Ok, so I've been doing a lot of reading on wordpress "duplicate content" issues. The more I read, the more I realise that there is no real consensus on what constitutes duplicate content, let alone how best to deal with it. I've seen some articles that say use noindex,follow meta tags on everything but the home page, static pages, and the articles themselves. I've seen other articles that say that there really are no duplicate content issues, as long as there aren't multiple urls that lead to exactly the same content (ie. 2 urls to the same specific article). The one thing I've taken from it all though, is that indexing category / tag pages can be important for ranking on topics (in combination with link backs), because they can be richer in relevant keywords than individual posts. But, I didn't want tag pages with just 1 or 2 posts being indexed, since they are too similar to individual story pages. So, I came up with a small plugin that is a bit smarter in the use of the noindex meta tags. It does the usual, and stops the indexing of certain pages, but it also looks at all category / tag pages, and only allows indexing of those pages which have more than a certain number of posts on them. I named it the Dilution Factor, since it makes sure that pages aren't so similar that they may be flagged. Other settings include optional paged content index blocking, and the option to only index parent categories. I made it this evening, and posted it on my blog, so thought I'd share it in a few places to see what people thought. You can view the post, and the articles that let up to it, here. I may add unique meta description tags to the plugin also at some point, but its been done many times already, so there may be no need. Let me know what you think, and whether its even worth it. And of course, I'd like to know your thoughts on the issue of duplicate content as a whole!
Decided to go ahead and add unique meta description tags to all post, category, tag, and static pages. Updated to v1.1
How would you generate the 'unique' meta descriptions? would it randomly choose a position to start from the post content and use an exceprt?
Well, for the post pages, I've simply used the first 30 words of the post excerpt (or content if no excerpt available) as the meta description. The introduction to every post should be a synopsis / overview anyway. Category pages use the category name and description, and tag pages for now just use the tag name a couple of times in a phrase. I haven't included meta keywords yet, still wondering if they will really help at all. I've done it that way because it can all be done automatically, but it could certainly evolve to also allow manual input of meta descriptions for the different category and tag pages. The main reason for making the plugin was to stop categories / tag pages that were too similar to post pages (ie. only had 1 or 2 posts listed) from being indexed, adding the meta descriptions is just a complimentary measure. EDIT: now at v1.2, for very basic page title re-writing, download available here.
Try the All In One SEO Pack. I installed it on one of my test sites and it works pretty well. It can automatically create meta tags and descriptions or you can specify post by post.
Just wanted to bring people's attention to a few posts, made by Aaron Wall, and ShoeMoney. If Aaron Wall says something, it's usually best to follow his advice! http://www.seobook.com/archives/002021.shtml http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/02/01/...ve-new-months/ http://www.shoemoney.com/robots.txt In summary, Aaron talks about not spreading your link authority across too many pages. Less is more, is the feeling I get from his post. He also gave some advice to ShoeMoney, which resulted in a 1400% increase in traffic to some pages (don't expect the same results). It seems to have been a combination of not allowing indexing of "fluff" pages, combined with the acquiring of a few choice links to get pages out of the supplementals. If you look at ShoeMoney's robots file, you will see that category pages have been dis-allowed from the index. I found that interesting. Anyone got any comments or analysis on what Aaron / SM have said in the above posts?