5 Common WordPress Duplicate Content Issues & How to Fix Them

WordPress makes life simple for small companies, bloggers, and enormous information websites. You have greatest practices routinely utilized in lots of instances like canonical hyperlinks and there are plugins for virtually every part else you want.

With the convenience of publishing content material and designs, you even have a brand new challenge:

Duplicate content material.

(*5*) is a standard cause why a WordPress web site gained’t rank.

Although it’s completely different from what we historically know in search engine optimisation as duplicate content material (a precise replication of content material from wording to code), it’s comparable and wishes to be addressed.

Here are the 5 most typical kinds of duplicate content material points in WordPress and the way to repair them.

1. Tags

Tags are an enormous drawback for a lot of WordPress web sites. When you tag an article it creates a singular web page that is stuffed with different content material you are feeling is related.

The web page will characteristic snippets from articles or full articles. If the tag is identical as a class or foremost web page in your core web site (assuming it’s not a weblog), you then’ve now created a competitor to that web page by yourself web site.

Tags are additionally normally modified variations of themselves, which creates extremely comparable content material that can compete with itself.

When this occurs, not one of the pages will rank and it could actually doubtlessly devalue the location.

Good information! This is a straightforward repair.

You can both eliminate the tags altogether, or you possibly can add a meta robots noindex dofollow.

The noindex dofollow tag will inform engines like google it is a skinny web page however comply with the hyperlinks and proceed to crawl and index my web site.

Now engines like google will know that the web page isn’t as helpful as others and also you’ve proven them how to uncover your good content material – the person posts and pages.

2. Categories

Category pages have a tendency to characteristic quite a few posts and articles like a tag.

They’ll have H1 tags which might be the identical because the articles, they don’t all the time reply a query or present a very good resolution since they’re article snippets they usually is probably not good to present for folks searching for solutions.

That is why they’re normally thought of skinny content material.

There is an exception, although.

Search Engine Journal, for instance, is a WordPress web site the place the classes are devoted to channels and niches inside a channel.

A person looking for data on a channel, on the whole, could discover a class very helpful. Because of this, you need to method it otherwise than you’d a tag.

In this case, you add a meta robotic index and dofollow tags, but in addition create distinctive titles and replica for the class to introduce it – and, if schema is related, add that in as nicely.

Now you’ve helped to outline the kinds of queries and other people to present the web page to.

You could also be rewarded by the various search engines for it. Just be sure that they aren’t aggressive together with your core web site pages for those who’re a enterprise.

3. Competing Topics

The subsequent factor that I see when auditing WordPress websites is a scarcity of distinctive content material.

Let’s take into consideration meals bloggers. Yes, recipe schema and different issues will assist to differentiate the recipes, however what for those who aren’t utilizing that or didn’t know to start with?

If you may have 20 recipes for chocolate chip cookies, likelihood is lots of them are utilizing comparable wording and components, which is what may very well be creating competitors.

Each recipe is exclusive and might serve a unique function, however for those who don’t put within the additional work, they is probably not in a position to present up as a result of they’re competing with one another.

In this case, you might have considered trying to do a class or subcategory for the cookies. If you possibly can’t, revisit them and add modifiers (e.g., spicy, savory, chewy, for events, for big teams).

Next, start including copy (not essentially to the highest, since you need to ship the precise recipe shortly to the person) in regards to the completed product. Make certain the copy stays related to the subject and reveals why, how, and the place it’s distinctive from the others.

Need different examples?

Have you achieved a themed reward information or vacation publish? Has something modified except for the 12 months? Mother’s Day craft concepts? Romantic Valentine’s Gifts for XYZ?

These should not distinctive sufficient. If you may have a number of posts, they may all compete.

If you add a 12 months to your title (e.g., 2016, 2017), folks could go you by in the various search engines for not being related this 12 months. That’s the place the methods above might help.

4. Search Box URLs

I haven’t come throughout this one as typically, however search containers on WordPress websites could generate URLs.

If somebody externally hyperlinks to certainly one of these URLs, or if engines like google can crawl and discover them, they could be indexable.

Although you can attempt to routinely add a meta robots noindex dofollow like within the tags, that most likely doesn’t have you ever lined.

To deal with this one you want to discover the distinctive identifier that the search field URLs have in widespread. It’s normally a “?” after the primary URL.

Now go into your robots.txt and add a disallow to this parameter. In concept, and if achieved accurately, it will assist to cut back the skinny or duplicate content material points from these.

5. Other

With programs that automate lots of work and make life simple, different points can come up that create duplicate or skinny content material points.

Look at your web site and see if you could have different ones.

They might embrace creating PDF variations of content material for printing which might be additionally indexable, or alternate variations in quotes which could be unhealthy for brief posts.

You could have an RSS feed that posts content material pages as an alternative of snippets and solely feeding titles or descriptions (I feel I’ve solely discovered this as soon as, so it isn’t one thing an enormous challenge to fear about).

Summary

Overall, most of those WordPress points are simple to detect and resolve utilizing the methods above. By eliminating your duplicate content material you need to get the natural search rankings you need.

Image Credits: Paulo Bobita