I've been reading some threads and noticed that people talks about "duplicate content" when using Word Press, and how it may affect your site keyword ranking. What's the deal with that, how exactly does that affect site positioning, and how can you avoid it? Thanks!!!
duplicate content penalty was established for many reasons. the main reason was to avoid black hat seo methods like scraper sites and especially to prevent adsense from becoming diluted. many webmaster create "made for adsense" websites. these websites serve no value to the user. webmasters create tons of websites just for adsense revenue and copy and paste content into those made for adsense websites. therefore flooding the serps with content found on other websites and decreasing the value of adsense to google advertisers.
To avoid duplicate content from wordpres, be sure that you delete all of the generic content/text from your wordpress theme: For example: your theme might have an "about us" slot in the header with filler text. If you keep it there and do not edit the PHP file, it will effect your SERPS because this would count as duplicate content.
I would advice you to check Dan's wordpress SEO checklist. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3708201#post3708201 @8everything: Good tip regarding "about us"
Very interesting... thanks a lot... I just read Dan's checklist and he says that categories, tags, and archive sections of the website also create duplicate content (I guess because a single post can be found in many ways, like in categories, archives, and so on). Is that how it is?... At least thats what I understood... and that the SEO all in one plugin helps me solving that...
You can select "Use noindex for Categories/Archives/Tags" to avoid duplicate content penalty for these pages. Just install "All in one seo pack" locally on a wordpress blog and try it yourself