Branding Rant

Since this is the third installment in my series about WordPress Internal Linking structure and SEO, I have decided to address a very interesting and pertinent topic which Bloggers often overlook.

That is the problem of duplicate content.

If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you read my previous articles which build upon and discuss the plugins mentioned in them. So here they are:

• Part One: Plugins
• Part Two: Using NoFollow, HTML Sitemaps and Tags Pages

Anyway, let’s take a look at what you need to know about duplicate content.

What is Duplicate Content?

You must have heard by now that using the same work on one site as you do on another site, is a bad thing to do. Although, people don’t really wonder about duplicate content within their own sites. Should they be? Certainly. You only have to look to Google’s definition of Duplicate content to realise that it matters.

“…substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”

See? It even applies to content within your own domain!

How Does it Affect my Site?

Again, looking to Google, they claim that it doesn’t affect your standing in their search results. Instead, you’re probably likely to have the wrong page listed in the search engines. For a lot of people this may not be an issue, but for me, it really has an adverse effect.

Blogs in particular that show the post content on the homepage as well as inside the individual posts are of particular concern. You see, your homepage is likely to have greater authority in search engines than your individual posts. If this is the case, which it most likely is, you’ll see your homepage indexed with your new content, quicker than your individual posts are. You’ll also end up spreading your Page Rank unnecessarily onto pages you won’t cash in, with.

It’s also unlikely that any of your pages will turn up in the results at all, down the track!

Thankfully, I’ve worked to solve this issue. Read on to find out how…

Using Excerpt Editor to Reduce Duplicate Content

To prevent sending your users to the wrong page or spreading Page Rank onto useless pages, try using Excerpt Editor. Install it on your blog and go through your posts, making a 50-100 word excerpt for each of them in the Excerpt Editor interface (shown below). You’ll find it in your Dashboard under “Manage | Excerpt Editor“.

Once you’ve done that, goto “Replace Posts” at the top and make it show Excerpts on the homepage. This might also be a good time to add excerpts to archives and category pages but I deleted the excerpts off there anyway.

Using the Read More Tag

Alternatively, you can also use the “Read More” tag located in the WYSIWYG editor for your posts. It looks like this:

All you need to do is cut off a post after your introduction. You can see the “Read More” tag in use on SmallBusinessBranding.com.

WordPress Template Mods for Duplicate Content

I recommend removing as much unnecessary content and links from your sidebar. The less you have there, the less likely you will be perceived to have duplicate content, especially on the pages where you only have a short article.

Furthermore, you can visit your Tags pages and Category pages so that they do not display a post excerpt.

Using Robots.txt

Finally, if you’re really keen, I suggest you optimise your robots.txt file. This is a file that sits in your domain’s root directory and it tells search engine spiders what they should and shouldn’t crawl. I’ve read reports that one guy managed to increase his PR from a 2 to a 4 using one of these. I doubt it’s true but it’s worth a shot according to Aaron Wall’s Internal Linking article.

Here is mine as an example:

User-agent: *

# Disallow all directories and files within
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /contact
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

# Disallow all files ending with these extensions
Disallow: /*.php$

# Disallow parsing individual post feeds, categories and trackbacks..
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /category/*
Disallow: /tag/*

# BEGIN XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN
Sitemap: http://www.brandingrant.com/sitemap.xml.gz
# END XML-SITEMAP-PLUGIN

It’s a combination between the files on this robots.txt post at Connected Internet and this robots.txt post from Filination. If you use these you’ll manage to maximise your Page Rank on all of your pages.

That concludes my take on the effect of Duplicate Content on the internal linking structure of WordPress. Next in this series is not far away, so stay tuned.

Changelog

16/01/08

Changed Robots.txt to block tags pages as well.
Added Section for Wordpress Template Modifications