more… is less duplicate content on wordpress
Duplicate content is a bit of a hassle sometimes. SEOmoz has a pretty good post on duplicate content which really sorted the whole process of search engines’ treatment of duplicate content out in my mind. Its an excellent article, I really like this sort of thing with really clear ideas outlined with really clear illustrations.
Duplicate content seems to be a pretty hot topic right now, creating a bit of a stir. Especially since results in the supplemental index are not considered quite as worthy as results in the main index. This blog itself seems to have around half the pages in the supplemental index - which obviously is not ideal.
While I am not suggesting that duplicate content will ban you to the supplementals, I don’t in fact know, but I would guess that duplication has some bearing on the calculations. Especially when considering page titles, meta descriptions etc. It may not even be perfect duplication per se, but duplicate enough to appear generated by a script of some kind.
More…
Enough about duplicate content though, with a blog such as this one links and link juice are fairly hard to come by. I have recently been finding that our pages, although relevant, were not showing up in SERPS. We would just make a new post, we would not use ‘more…’, the whole post would be published to the home page.
Going back to the article on seomoz I am going to guess what happened.
The home page having the most authority, being spidered the most etc., would have content on it that also appeared on the category page for that post and the post page itself. So when the big friendly search engine bot picked out the page most relevant to that topic - from our site - it would pick the home page.
This didn’t seem ideal to me for a few reasons:
- The home page had other posts on it so the content was not clearly about one topic, but many.
- The home page content was always changing, if a user arrived there they might not find what they were looking for if the search engine index was behind.
Using ‘more..’ I found I could effectively redirect the big friendly search engine bot to the most relevant and well optimised page on my site for each piece of content, which was the post page itself.
Both the home page and the categories page would have an identical short blurb, but drilling down, the post page would have the goods - and this is what google wants to provide its users in turn right?
Compound the benefits:
So you have the search engines picking your post page. You have combated the duplicate content issues and that is half the battle. The other half is getting a poorly ranked, low authority page to rank well for your keywords.
I was reading an article by Jill Whalen from High Rankings which was all about title tags. There is a passage down the bottom which interested me most:
Some content management systems (CMS) and blog software such as WordPress automatically generate the title tag from information you provide elsewhere. In WordPress, for example, the default is to use your blog name, plus whatever you named the page. The problem is that this same info is also used as the headline, plus in the navigational link to the page. Depending on your setup, it could also be the URL for that page. Very rarely would you want all those to be the same.
It seemed that although my title tags were not necessarily duplicated exactly, they were duplicate enough to trigger content filters?
So I followed Jill’s advice and installed the title tag plugin from Stephan Spencer at Netconcepts (which has had a recent release). This alone had significant effects and allowed me to focus my post pages on the keywords I wanted without having to put up with the computer generated approximations.
Since then I have followed more of Jill’s advice, paying more attention to the relationship between the page title, the page heading and the filename (post slug). I have also inspected the pages indexed on my site, the pages going supplemental, the pages that appear to have high levels of duplicate content.
Combating Duplicate Content Issues on Wordpress Roundup:
What I did (and you should too)…
- read rand and jill’s articles
- installed the title tag plugin
- used ‘more…’ and hacked the get_the_content() function of wordpress to create a teaser even if ‘more…’ did not exist
- wrote unique page titles, headings and post slugs for my posts
- removed ‘tag’ pages from the index with a line in robots.txt like:
Disallow: /blog/index.php?tag=
Have fun, hope this helps and feel free to leave feedback below.
Update:
Looks like Greywolf bet me to this topic. He has a great video on optimising your wordpress blog, it covers many of the same points which is heartening - at least for me anyway 
- but also mentions archived material and other areas that wordpress duplicates your work which I hadn’t thought of.
Related posts:
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Gotta love those drawings of Rand’s. I’m going to use those to explain the problem to clients, because I usually get carried away with the detailed technical explanation that nobody cares about.
I still say duplicate content is decided by the words around the search phrase, after doing some fairly extensive testing last year (though in all fairness a lot has changed since then). Small tweaks to content in the right places can make all the difference in who is dupe and who isn’t.