WordPress Duplicate Content
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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