Find out Duplicate Content on Your WordPress Blog and Fix Them

Once the tags and categories have been allotted to the posts that are uploaded on the site, the most common look and feel of the site says that you can get the same post under certain pages for corresponding tags and categories. To prevent this, you can program WordPress to only show an excerpt of the post under tags page and to redirect to the main post when asked by the user. This no doubt reduces the chances of duplicate pages.

Author & Archives

Putting up the author or archive links on the blog is one of the most user-friendly additions to the blog, but the pages that are created under this are having the same content as the main post as such are indexed by the search partners. The way out is to program the archives to display excerpt of the post rather than the whole post.

Attachment URL issue

The links that are set for the attachments up for the posts like pictures or videos are in itself creating multiple links, as the same media maybe uploaded elsewhere on the internet. The best way to get out of it is to display the media on your page and not to link it to its root source. Moreover setting the attachment’s URL to the parent post in a way would also help you fight some canonicalization issues.

Canonical Issues

• http://domain.com/new-blog-post
• http://domain.com/ new-blog-post/
• http://www.domain.com/ new-blog-post
• http://www.domain.com/ new-blog-post/

All of the above links would take you to the same very page.  Thus making the URL settings to create canonical page URLs can reduce or remove this said problem that gives rise to duplicate pages.

Now to make up for a canonical page URL, you can follow the codes below:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mysite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

The above codes are expected to be inserted into your .htaccess file in order to facilitate 301 redirects.

Content stealing by third party

Once the content from your page is copied and hosted under another domain name, the repetition issue becomes a problem again. In this case, you are unable to take care of the problem themselves and must approach the search administrator, like Google DMCA which allows you to file complaints in order to remove duplicate or copied content from the indexes.

Adding non-index, no follow Meta tags

This means that one tells the search engines which pages from your blog the spiders must crawl so as to avoid coming across repeated data. Simple enough to do is to edit the homepage codes under theme editor in WP; i.e. to insert the following codes within the head.  

if((is_home() && ($paged < 2 )) || is_single() || is_page() || is_category()){
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
}


Adding Unique Meta description

Utilizing independent WP plugins, you can easily crawl through the posts to select out excerpts of posts to add to Meta description. This helps spiders stay off the duplicate data that is found in the main post or other tags and categories pages. As such it is clear that to get the most out of the web and to draw in the maximum traffic, you must be aware of killing the duplicate links so as to get recognized by the search engines and to get and keep the traffic coming over.