Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

The Wordpress blogging platform is vulnerable to a critical kind of SEO mistake or bug: duplicate content. Because it offers multiple views of data–by author, category, rss, search, or a plugin-enabled view–it is easy to be penalized by Google’s new duplicate content filter. For example, check out page two of my Cornell blog’s SERPS right now:

They all point to a special stripped-down print page which offers an easy way to print:

See how clean the copy is? Clearly, Google believes that the print pages are the authority for these blogs, and not the blog permanent links themselves. This is a problem–how to solve it? First, I removed the wp-print.php script and references to it. This will now cause all the print pages to 404. I toyed with a 301 redirect, but that would require me knowing a little more information to find the proper URL, and I deemed it not worth it. Then, to prevent this in the future, I am using the robots meta tag:

<?php if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page()){
echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">’;
} else {
echo ‘<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">’;
} ?>

This will allow robots to only index posts, pages, and the frontpage. The rest it can crawl for links and such.

8 Responses to 'Critical SEO Tip for Wordpress'

1. coverfire.com » Blogs and search engines and Wordpress said:

   on March 26th, 2006 at 2:53 pm

   […] The solution then, is simple. URLs which contain multiple posts should be marked “noindex,follow” while individual posts should be marked “index,follow”. This should result in the content of each post only being in the search engine database once. I also found a post called A critical SEO Tip for Wordpress which describes a way to accomplish this in Wordpress. The slighly modified version of this solution which I have added to my Wordpress theme’s header.php is below. Unless there are downsides to this approach that I don’t know of, I think every theme author should add something like this to their theme. […]

2. links for 2006-05-03 - Nico’s Blog said:

   on May 28th, 2006 at 11:26 am

   […] Wordpress Duplicate Content (tags: seo google wordpress templates) Posted by del.icio.us Filed in Links […]

3. Wordpress Urllist Generator - Nico’s Blog said:

   on May 28th, 2006 at 11:29 am

   […] I based the script on Jared Quinn’s script. His script has more features, but I just wanted a script that output all the permanlinks of my site’s posts and pages. I block my category and archive pages from being indexed using Elliot Back’s method. […]

4. Miike said:

   on August 4th, 2006 at 2:02 pm

   ‘noindex,follow’ does not work. If a page is not indexed it WILL NOT be followed by google. In addition, there is no need to specify ‘index,follow’ because that is the default

5. gio said:

   on December 20th, 2006 at 7:00 am

   I think you got it wrong Miike. By default google crawls every page but not necessarily index them all. Pages with ‘noindex,follow� are also crawled but not indexed.

6. links for 2007-02-05 said:

   on February 5th, 2007 at 12:33 am

   […] Critical SEO Tip for Wordpress by Elliott Back (tags: seo wordpress tips) […]

7. xt commerce blog - Freier Holger said:

   on March 25th, 2007 at 7:44 am

   good article - i have find a plugin to avoid dc
   here the link: seologs.com/duplicate-content-cure/

8. Where Else to Put It? said:

   on August 8th, 2007 at 6:25 am

   Matt Cutts Publishing Duplicate Content on His WordPress Blog…

   (Or…SEO Experts Still Getting it Wrong on WordPress Duplicate Content…) Following my posts last week about the latest duplicate content vulnerability in the WordPress blogging platform, it didn’t take long for someone to point out tha…

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