Common WordPress Duplicate Content Issues & How to Fix Them

Common WordPress Duplicate Content Issues & How to Fix Them

WordPress is a breeze for bloggers, small-sized businesses, and news sites of all sizes. The best practices are automatically implemented in a variety of cases, such as canonical hyperlinks, and it has plugins for almost everything else you’ll need.

In addition to the convenience of publishing information and design, it also brings a new issue:

Duplicate content.

Content duplication is the most common reason why the WordPress site won’t be ranked.

While it’s not the standard definition of SEO in the sense of duplicate content (an exact copy of the content, from wording to code), it’s identical and should be dealt with.

These are the five most commonly encountered kinds of duplicate content problems in WordPress and the best way to resolve these issues.

Tags

Tags can be a big issue for a lot of WordPress websites. When you tag an article, it makes a new page, which is stuffed with other content that you consider to be pertinent.

The page will include short excerpts of articles or full articles. In the event that your tag appears to be similar to the category or the main page on your main website (assuming that it’s an actual blog), Then you’ve created a rival page on your site.

Tags can also be altered versions, which results in very similar content that will be able to compete with each other.

In this case, none of the pages will rank, and it could likely devalue the website.

The good news is that it’s not too late! It’s a simple fix.

You could either eliminate the tags or incorporate meta robots do follow follow.

The follow noindex tag informs search engines that it’s a thin site however, if you follow the links, they will proceed to index and crawl my website.

Search engines now know that your page isn’t as helpful as the others, and you’ve demonstrated to them how to find your best content, the individual posts and pages.

Virtual SEO Summit

Discover the future of search by speaking with the most renowned SEO leaders on October. 25.

Categories

Pages for categories typically have many articles and posts similar to tags.

They’ll be tagged with H1 tags, which are similar to the articles, but they’re not always able to provide a solution to a problem or the best solution because they’re article snippets and may not be helpful to those seeking answers.

They’re thought of as”thin” content.

There’s an exception. However, there is an exception.

Search Engine Journal, for instance is an example of a WordPress website, where the categories are divided into niches and channels within channels.

For someone looking for information about an individual channel, for example, it is possible to find a category quite useful. In this case, you must take it in a different way from the tag.

In this scenario you’ll need to create a meta-robot index, and dofollow tag however, you must also come up with distinctive titles and copy the category in order to present it. And If the schema is important, you can add schema as well.

Now, you’ve defined the types of queries to be used and who to show your page.

It could be rewarding by indexing engines in exchange for this. Be sure to ensure that your pages aren’t competing with your primary web pages if you’re an enterprise.

Competing Topics

Another thing I observe when looking at WordPress websites is the lack of content that is unique.

Let’s look at food bloggers. Sure, the recipe schema and other tools can assist in distinguishing those recipes. However, what happens happens if you’re not using it or didn’t realize it at the beginning?

If you’ve got 20 Chocolate chip cookie recipes, it is likely that many of them use the same words and ingredients. This is why it could be causing some competition.

Each recipe is distinctive and may serve a unique reason, but if don’t do the effort required you might not appear due to the fact that they’re competing against one another.

In this scenario, you might want to create the cookies in a subcategory or category. the cookies. If not, go back to the cookies and add modifications (e.g. chewy, spicy, savory, or savoury for parties, or for large crowds).

After that, add a paragraph (not necessarily on top because you want to present the recipe as quickly as possible to the customer) about the product. Be sure that the content is relevant to the subject and explains why, how it’s different from the rest.

Do you need more examples?

Have you created a theme-based gift guide or post about the holidays? Have you seen any changes from last year? Mother’s Day craft ideas? Romantic Valentine’s Gifts for XYZ?

These aren’t distinctive enough. If you have several posts, they may all be in competition.

If you include a year in your name (e.g., 2016 or 2017), it could cause people to be able to pass you by on search engines due to not being relevant for this year. This is where the strategies mentioned below can help.

Search Box URLs

I haven’t encountered this issue so often, however the search boxes on WordPress websites may produce URLs.

If an external source links to those URLs or search engines search and locate them, they could be indexed.

While you can automate the addition of an meta robots noindex dofollow tag like the tags, it will not be enough.

To resolve this issue, you must find the unique identifier URLs of search engines share. It’s typically an “?” after the primary URL.

Go to your robots.txt and include a disallow parameter. In theory, if executed correctly, this should aid in reducing the duplicate or thin issues of content that arise that result from these.

Other

With automated systems that streamline many tasks and simplify life, however, there can be other issues that can cause issues with thin or duplicate content.

Take a look at your website and see if it is possible that you have any other sites.

These could include the creation of PDF versions of the content that can also be indexed, or alternative versions with quotes that are not suitable for blogs with short content.

You might be using one of the RSS feed that is posting content pages rather than short snippets, and feeds only descriptions or titles (I believe I’ve only discovered this one time and it’s not is a major issue to be concerned about).

 

Leave a Reply