WordPress Duplicate Content

Posted September 23rd, 2008 No Comments »

WordPress producing duplicate content is an issue which I’ve heard about a couple of times recently, and it seems to me that it’s something that every blogger should spend a little time in correcting.

The problem is that, by design, WordPress takes your posts and reproduces that content in archive pages, tag pages and feeds. Search engines don’t like duplicate content and will typically exclude pages they see as duplicates. But, they seem to have a habit of indexing those copies of your posts, and not the actual posts themselves. Not only that, but the duplicates that have been indexed don’t get very good rankings at all.

As Paul from themakemoneyonline.net has pointed out, this could be a simple, 5 second fix. However, while fixing the issue on your site might only take a few seconds, reversing the effects in the search engines may take considerably longer while they re-index your pages, as Kirsty found out here.

I think the word needs to be spread about this because as Kirsty proved during her testing, this problem can have a drastic effect on a sites organic traffic numbers, and therefore the overall success of the site.

I’ve actually found that if I search Google for pages it has indexed from my site that alot of my posts are there, so hopefully this hasn’t affected me too much so far, but I am going to be implementing Paul’s fix and also some of the suggestions from Kirsty and hopefully avoid this problem.

Hopefully this also helps some of your guys out there.

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Checking Your Pages For Duplicate Content

Posted July 23rd, 2008 No Comments »

This is a follow on to my last post about where to get good quality content for your affiliate sites.

These are a couple of tools I’ve found which I think could be very useful if you are using free articles, or content from sites such as Wikipedia, to check how similar your pages are to others.

  • Similar Page Checker by webconfs.com
    This tool allows you to compare two pages and gives you a percentage of how similar they are. So if, for example, you’ve taken a Wikipedia article and modified it with some of your own writing (or even mashed it up with free content from elsewhere I guess…), you can check your new page against Wikipedia’s page to see how similar they are.
    Hopefully the lower the percentage, the less likely you will be penalised by Google for duplicate content.
  • Copyscape
    This tool allows you to enter your page URL, then searches for other sites which have the same/similar content. You can then click through to those sites and Copyscape will even highlight the blocks of text it sees that is the same as yours.
    I can see this being useful for deciding whether to use a particular free article or not. You can stick the URL of the article into this tool and see how many others out there are using the same thing on their site.

If you have any experience of the above tools, or know of any similar ones then please post a comment.