WordPress Google Duplicate Content Penalty! SEO FIX
admin on Apr 24 2008 at 10:56 am | Filed under: google duplicate content penalty
HughesTech Labs:
First off, Google’s duplicate content penalty is still very much alive!
Even though Google removed the saying “Supplemental Result“ from the search results many months back, it is still very much in play!
To see all your web-pages that are still in the Supplemental Results at Google:
Type in:
[site:yourfulldomainname/]
Now look at all your pages, wow looks like Google has all of them in their normal index!
Now type this in:
[site:yourfulldomainname/*]
Now see how many of your pages show-up!
Good chance that your missing pages have a duplicate content penalty, but you know you did not copy any content from any other site right? Yes, you are right!
WordPress can get you tons of duplicate content on your own unique posts.
How you ask?
Well WordPress lists your latest posts on the main page of your blog and not just a snippet, the entire post, but then WordPress creates a permalink to the post with the exact same content!
Googlebot sees duplicate content and puts a penalty on one of the pages!
Nice right?
And you thought the duplicate content penalty was just for coping content from other domains, NOT!
In-fact I bet Google has more duplicate content penalties for pages within a domain than they do for coping content from another domain!
The SEO Fix:
Limit the number of posts that are displayed on your Blog’s main page.
In WordPress’s Admin screen select Options then select Reading, scroll down to Blog Pages:
Show at most: [10] change this value to 1
Even though Google will see your latest post on your main page, they should now see all your previous post within the permalink as not duplicate content.
We actually removed all the tags being displayed on the main page, and the post pages because google was picking up on them more than the actual posts.
Now, granted you will still get a duplicate content penalty for your latest post, but at least it will show in the search results at Google as your main page or the permalink page until your next post.
We have been fighting Google’s duplicate content filtering on several of our websites for almost 2 years now, and these are legitimate sites.
Hope this helps……
