Does WordPress create duplicate content?
February 4, 2009 Author: Adam Lee
Something i’ve wondered for a while but never really looked into it. The homepage of a WordPress template shows the content of a post and then offers the link to an individual post page, so my first thought is duplicate content.
So i’ve always created my posts as excerpts then link it to the main post. I’m still thinking this is the best approach as anyone deciding to link to a post will then definately link to the actual post instead of the homepage which will eventually lose that post as new ones push it down.
Looking at a number of different wordpress blogs in Google i can see that even if the homepage does have the entire post on it it tends to be the post page that ranks – which makes sense as the post page will be optimised for the specific search terms (titles, headers, content etc)
No i’m still torn between the excerpt idea and the full text, but i’ve decided to take a usability approach on this – basically i prefer reading all new posts from a single page without having to click back and forth and as Google seems to be ranking the actual post page anyway i’m going to take this approach from now on.
What’s your views on this?
2 Responses to “Does WordPress create duplicate content?”
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February 11th, 2009 at 10:36 am
I think it’s best to use exercepts on the homepage, but really that comes down to personal preference because Google will generally rank the actual post.
Having said that, check out your categories pages: http://www.noporkpies.com/category/innovation – same for tag pages, they’ll all relist your posts in full. It’s usually best to noindex these to prevent any dupe content issues – Yoast has a plugin to sort that easily http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/
February 11th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Thanks for the comment.
I think from a user point of view i prefer having the full post on the homepage cause it reduces the number of clicks to read content.
With regards to the category pages – I’ve already blocked these in the robots.txt file so no issues there but thanks for the suggestion.