Duplicate content in Wordpress

I was wondering if categorizing posts in to more than one category creates duplicate content in wordpress?, and does it count against my site?

 

You can use robots.txt (or all in one seo) plug-in to get rid of such duplicate content issue. And yes, this surely means duplicate content.

 

Hi,

This is a tricky one actually. Certainly with a new blog you will be fighting against duplicate content because you have a home page, RSS feed, (maybe an archive for the present month) and these will be very similar.

Cross-posting to multiple categories in a brand new blog will also increase your content duplication but may be unavoidable if you want to make the categories useful for your readers ie will boost your readership loyalty and perhaps boost your chances of a acquiring backlinks.

I'd avoid posting to multiple categories to be honest, and certainly never allow an article to appear in more than two cats. I'd prefer to create my categories so that this wouldn't be necessary, but if it were necessary I wouldn't sweat it too much.... just keep going and it'll sort itself out!

 

I think if you are posting in many category it could be harmful for serp

 

If you consistently post articles to those categories only, then the two categories, as well as your home page are going to look similar.

Let us take a random example with two categories- Manchester United and the English Premiership.

If you're only going to post on the EPL, and with news on Man Utd in particular, then you would post it to both those categories, and they'll look similar, along with the home page. Mix it in- do a couple of posts that talk about the Premiership but not about Man Utd, and vice versa too.

Generally there is no reason to post to more than one category, or so I've noticed with my posts.

 

Thank you guys for your advice. It is a new blog so i will stop posting in multiple categories.
jitendraag recommended using robots.txt. I am new to wordpress and I am not sure what to block using robots.txt. It will be awesome if someone could explain that to me. Thanks in advance

 

jacobt5603, It is very easy. I do include multiple categories for a single post for the visitors to get relevant posts via them. In fact the Wordpress architecture built that feature just for that purpose. It is not against SEO as long as you do the following:

* Install the "All In One SEO" plugin.
* Make sure that you check noindex option for tags, categories, and archives.

You'll be fine. Hope his helps!

 

Well yes it will be duplicate content and it don't make lot of difference as far as the big picture is concerned. Though personally I am not a great fan of putting same post in multiple categories, it should be alright if you have decent number of posts No Big Deal!

 

Thanks for all the advice it is was very helpful

 

Here's a very useful plugin: http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/

It let's you decide which pages bots can and can't read. I've blocked the date based and author based archives, but left the categories open. You can choose which archives to block or allow.

 

you can use the plugins that guys here talked about

i think it will help

 

also you can use the_excerpt() function on homepage, category and tags pages.

 

I think JKfriends solutions is a good one as that's how I do it. The same post in multiply categories will certainly show as duplicate content in Google.

 

so many people doing the same its not a big thing but as per my experience use fresh content.

 

What about tags? Should we stop using tags too? Definitely no. Sometimes (often) , we just think too much about what SE would think about our pages.

The #1 Google rule is to write for visitors not for SE.

If you want to specify 4 categories and 10 tags for a post, just do it. Don't worry about duplicate and so on, SE are aware of the normal blogs behavior. You don't have to think for them, they are already taking care of all this things, after all they are multi billion dollar companies.

I used to have a blog in the past where I did a similar experiment. Had around 20 posts and 30 indexed pages in google. One day, I added between 5 and 10 tags to each post. Guess what? After 2 weeks, I was having the same 20 posts but jumped to 250 indexed pages. And no, I haven't been penalized, all the pages were shown as unique. More, the traffic had more than doubled.

In short: write for visitors not for SE.

 

Do not worry about this issue. After all its not an issue at all...
Check this out : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

I think the second point is very much similar to our scenario here. Its just the same post displayed via different URLs.. So, never mind about this..