Comment on WordPress SEO Tutorial by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO The Duplicate Content WordPress Plugin is not a plugin I’d use. Was very concerned to read it originally blocked Category pages through noindex! I have loads of SERPs due to Category pages, so would never block the spidering/indexing of those!

There’s an issue with wasted links/PR using a plugin like this. Take the monthly archive pages, most themes by default have the monthly archive links on every page, this means with a 1,000 page WordPress blog we are looking at 12,000 links to monthly archive pages for every year of archives!

What a waste of link benefit for so little traffic!

This plugin doesn’t remove these links it stops the pages linked to (the archive pages) from being indexed making a waste of link benefit into a COMPLETE WASTE OF LINK BENEFIT with no traffic at all. That’s because Google doesn’t consider those 12,000 links as not existing anymore.

So I would never use a WordPress plugin like this, everything the plugin does and so much more can be achieved easily through theme coding.

If you use my themes as intended you will limit most duplicate content.

I advise not having a monthly archive section on the sidebar, but if you do the themes are setup to only show these links on the home pages. So with a 1,000 page site you only get them on the home page and the archived home pages (home page page 2, home page page 3 etc…) so http://www.elvincountry.com/ has 110 archived home pages and so there would be 110 pages linking to the monthly archive pages not over 1,000 (that site has about 1,000 posts, with the Categories probably 1,500 pages). As a side note Google tends not to index all these types of archive pages (no keyword focus, little traffic to them) so those 110 pages maybe 30 will be indexed. Better than all 1,000 pages linking to these practically useless monthly archive pages, but still not what I’d use my link power for. Don’t add the monthly archive widget to your sidebar.

You want Categories to be indexed as long as you don’t repeat the same content in all the Categories. Use your commonsense on this one, there’s little point having 20 Categories if they all use the same posts, you can see on this site there’s a small number of Categories because it makes sense. The travel site has about 70 Categories because that makes sense.

My themes out the box use excerpts on all archive like pages: home archives, monthly archives, Categories, Tags and Search result pages. This means you won’t run into problems with your single blog posts (the pages most SERPs should come to) being treated as duplicate content to your archive pages.

As long as you don’t add those monthly archive links on your sidebar you have everything you need to have a well SEO’d site with low risks of duplicate content caused by WordPress.

BTW the plugin editor forgot about the home page archives, because of the way WordPress works there’s no way to block the indexing of the archived home pages through the header.php file, so you still have all those archived pages spidered and indexed. There is a way to block these through your robots.txt file, but considering how little link benefit goes from the home page to home page 2 to home page 3….. Google tends not to index them all anyway, I see these pages as a kind of sitemap so happy for them to be spidered/indexed, Google and other search engines need at least one way to find your posts.

David Law