Wordpress tags and duplicate content?
-
I've seen a few other Q&A posts on this but I haven't found a complete answer. I read somewhere a while ago that you can use as many tags as you would like. I found that I rank for each tag I used. For example, I could rank for best night clubs in san antonio, good best night clubs in san antonio, great best night clubs in san antonio, top best night clubs in san antonio, etc. However, I now see that I'm creating a ton of duplicate content.
Is there any way to set a canonical tag on the tag pages to link back to the original post so that I still keep my rankings? Would future tags be ignored if I did this?
-
It is true they will not "penalize" for tags or archives directly, but you can make your site much better by doing many of the things Mike recommends above.
I wrote a post talking through how to assess your tags, and deciding which ones to delete and/or noindex: here.
Here's the elephant in the room too, you may rank for those tags, but do they bring traffic? What is the on-site metrics for your tag traffic? Bounce rate? Time on page?
It is true you may rank for some tags, but in general they never provide traffic, or the right traffic, compared to the content its self.
-Dan
-
rel=canonical tells Google do not index this page because is a sort of duplicate content of this other one, the original one. I think, as I said, to optimize one tag page for 2/3/4 similar key phrases and you probably can do a redirect 301 from a couple of tag pages to the one you want to rank.
To avoid big mistakes I think it is a good idea to put original content in these tag pages. Use the tag description, and the excerpts (or custom fields) to give some original preview of the posts.
-
I still don't understand... I read this on Managewp.com:
Google (and other major search engines) will never penalize a WordPress site for having archive pages that publish and point to the same content. They confirmed this way back in 2008.
So.... can I still have all my tags? Is there anything wrong with having a lot of tags if I just show the excerpt? Or am I going to be penalized for duplicate content?
I don't want to lose the rankings I already have because of my tags by noindexing them, and I don't want to prevent getting future rankings because they're not indexed. But I also don't want to be penalized. Help!
-
Ok so it's possible to set the rel=canonical on each tag page to point to the main post. Will I still rank for the tags and it won't be considered duplicate content?
-
The SEO benefits of Tags tends to be negligible. Mainly they work together to help the user experience by tying together similar articles and increasing a visitor's time of site and pages viewed by offering them similar content that may draw their attention. The biggest problems with Tags (especially on Wordpress) is if you don't set them to NoIndex and have artciles to show Full instead of a Snippet on the archive page. When this happens you create a duplicate version on every Tag archive attached to the post, the Author archive, the category archive and the homepage. And a one-off tag with no other posts associated with it becomes useless because it creates more duplicate content without effectively tying your article to any other similar posts.
I almost always tell people with Wordpress blogs to switch posts to showing snippets on homepage and archives to lessen duplication, NoIndex archives, and (where possible) clean up & remove useless one-off tags that you don't think you'd use again and plan new content to add to the one-off tags you would use again.
-
I think you have to avoid putting all these tags. Create a single tag "Night Clubs in San Antonio" and work with content (tag description, tag title) and inbound links to optimize a single page for a couple of key phrases.
If you want to set rel=canonical you can use the Conditional Tags.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL slash creating duplicate content
Hi All, I currently have an issue whereby by domain name (just homepage) has: mydomain.com and: mydomain.com/ Moz crawler flags this up as duplicate content - does anyone know of a way I can fix this? Thanks! Jack
Technical SEO | | Jack11660 -
Cloud Hosting and Duplicate content
Hi I have an ecommerce client who has all their images cloud hosted (amazon CDN) to speed up site. Somehow it seems maybe because the pinned the images on pinterest but the CDN got indexed and there now seems to be about 50% of the site duplicated (about 2500 pages eg: http://d2rf6flfy1l.cloudfront.net..) Is this a problem with duplicate content? How come Moz doesnt show it up as crawl errors? Why is thisnot a problem that loads of people have?I only found a couple of mentions of such a prob when I googled it.. any suggestion will be grateful!
Technical SEO | | henya0 -
Joomla: content accesible through all kinds of other links >> duplicate content?!
When i did a site: search on Google i've noticed all kind of URL's on my site were indexed, while i didn't add them to the Joomla navigation (or they were not linked anywhere on the site). Some examples: www.domain.com/1-articlename >> that way ALL articles are publicly visible, even if they are not linked to a menu-item... If by accident such a link get's shared it will be indexed in google, you can have 2 links with same content... www.domain.com/2-uncategorised >> same with categories, automatically these overview pages are visible to people who know this URL. On it you see all the articles that belong to that category. www.domain.com/component/content >> this gives an overview of all the categories inside your Joomla CMS I think most will agree this is not good for your site's SEO? But how can this be solved? Is this some kind of setting within Joomla? Anyone who dealt with these problems already?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Duplicate content issue with Wordpress tags?
Would Google really discount duplicate content created by Wordpress tags? I find it hard to believe considering tags are on and indexed by default and the vast majority of users would not know to deindex them . . .
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Wordpress categories causing too many links/duplicate content?
I've just added categories to my wordpress site and some of the posts show in several of the categories. Will this cause me duplicate content problems as I want the category pages to be indexed? Also as I add more categories I'm creating more links on the page. They can't be seen to the user as I have a plugin that creates drop down categories. When I go to 'view source' though all the links are there so google will see lots of links. How can I fix the too many links problem? And should I worry about duplicate content issue?
Technical SEO | | SamCUK1 -
How can something be duplicate content of itself?
Just got the new crawl report, and I have a recurring issue that comes back around every month or so, which is that a bunch of pages are reported as duplicate content for themselves. Literally the same URL: http://awesomewidgetworld.com/promotions.shtml is reporting that http://awesomewidgetworld.com/promotions.shtml is both a duplicate title, and duplicate content. Well, I would hope so! It's the same URL! Is this a crawl error? Is it a site error? Has anyone seen this before? Do I need to give more information? P.S. awesomewidgetworld is not the actual site name.
Technical SEO | | BetAmerica0 -
How to fix duplicate page content error?
SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnostics is complaining about a duplicate page error. The example of links that has duplicate page content error are http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348855 http://www.equipnet.com/misc-spare-motors-and-pumps_listid_348852 These are not duplicate pages. There are some values that are different on both pages like listing # , equipnet tag # , price. I am not sure how do highlight the different things the two page has like the "Equipment Tag # and listing #". Do they resolve if i use some style attribute to highlight such values on page? Please help me with this as i am not really sure why seo is thinking that both pages have same content. Thanks !!!
Technical SEO | | RGEQUIPNET0 -
Duplicate content, Original source?
Hi there, say i have two websites with identicle content. website a had content on before website b - so will be seen as the original source? If the content was intended for website b, would taking it off a then make the orinal source to google then go to website b? I want website b to get the value of the content but it was put on website a first - would taking it off website a then give website b the full power of the content? Any help of advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0