Avoid duplicate content issue in webmaster tool for wordpress blogs

Lately, every now and then the question is asked how to avoid duplicate content in WordPress shown in Google Webmaster Tool.

What is this duplicate content?

This is meant that the same page content is accessible different URLs:

• https://thecustomizewindows.com/2010/11/create-a-shortcut-to-run-a-program-with-elevated-privileges-without-validation-of-auc/
• https://thecustomizewindows.com/2010/11/create-a-shortcut-to-run-a-program-with-elevated-privileges-without-validation-of-auc/?replytocom=73
• https://thecustomizewindows.com/?p=1810

What are the consequences for this duplicate content?

Affected sites are usually worse in the ranking in the search engine, as the link value is splitting. The previous theory that Google itself penalizes for harboring such pages is probably not right. But, another bad thing is, Google spider spends lot of time reading these pages, instead of scanning new or old valuable pages.

What to do about it?

There are different approaches to avoid duplicate content in WordPress.

• Adding this code:

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

• Additional pages can take up accordingly, is helpful in the WordPress Codex page Conditional Tags .
  Whether plugin or your own code: it is important that all your tests on the implementation, ie View the source code of different pages to see if “index, follow” or “noindex, follow” is issued, not the result of an error as Google does not index your pages.

• Making excerpt (not full post) to show in home, category, tag, archival pages.

• Adding nofollow to Tag, Archive, Category pages.

• Adding nofollow to comments.

• Modifying the robots text file to stop indexing comment and reply to comments.
• Avoiding Nested comments (From Settings > Discussion).

Will I add nofollow to Tags, archives and Category page?

Frankly, it depends on the structure of your site. Our Tag pages, category is dofollow, but Author archive is nofollow. we have around 800 posts by now and to better classify it, Tags and Category crawling is needed. If you see Google webmaster tool is complaining of duplicate content from tag or other pages, disallow it from robots file and nofollow it from any SEO pack or Theme SEO settings.

If you do not really copy paste same posts, it is unlikely that Google will penalize; but as we said, to make a clean and faster crawling, these duplicate stuffs should not be allowed.

WordPress and Bing : Duplicate content

No need to think, only think about Google. Over 86% user uses Google to search and extra work for Bing is not needed. We can not give guarantee about slower crawler like Bing that does not honor nofollow.

Among 800 posts, Google has indexed 794 posts; as we post so frequently, it lags a bit. Do you know about Bing? 25 posts are indexed! Do not laugh now. Bing sends traffic to the pages which are popular (in Google), yet not indexed by Bing!