WordPress blogs are great for helping you score well with search engine results.
These blogs are designed to update the search engines with new posts, so the new posts get indexed quickly.
Still, there are a number of hurdles that can affect your Search Engine Optimization efforts.
One of these is the question of duplicate content.
What is Duplicate Content and Why Does it Matter?
Duplicate content is content that is perceived, by the search engines as the same or duplicates of each other. There are various theories as to what happens when a search engine finds duplicate contents. Many SEO experts believe that, instead of indexing both posts, the search engines cancel the duplicates. Some say that the page with the highest authority (page rank, etc.) will have the content indexed. Others say it’s a more matter of timing – the first content to be indexed will be the ‘winner.”
In any case, you want to avoid duplicate content as much as possible, for the simple fact that search engines are designed to seek and reward those sites and blogs that serve up original content.
The trouble is, there are many small things that can make one blog post be perceived as duplicate content by the search engines. And this is where your work and attention to detail can pay off.
Let’s take a look at a few ways to prevent Duplicate Content with WordPress.
Customize your URL. In WordPress it automatically sets your blog post URL. The default looks something like this http://yourblogpost.com/?p=303
Of course taking a look at this, the URL doesn’t contain any keywords nor does it tell the search engines anything about your post or the contents. You can quickly fix this by going into your WordPress settings tab. Click Permalinks from the list and choose how you want your link to look. Hint: Make sure the name of your post is in the URL and then place keywords in the names of your posts for maximum search engine friendliness.
Once you take this step, you can edit the name of each post before you publish it. This can help the search engines focus on the keywords particularly when you have a long blog post title. For example, if your blog post’s title is, “10 tips to teach your dog to sit” you can quickly edit it to say “Teach your dog to sit.” The 10 tips part of the title is superfluous and doesn’t help search engine optimization.
There are also plug-ins that help eliminate duplicate content.
These plug-ins do everything from redirect visitors from old pages to new pages to eliminating some bookmarking sites from framing your content. For example Digg reframes your content with a sidebar and this can be perceived as duplicate content. A “no frames” plug-in would eliminate this from happening. And finally there are plug-ins that automatically create canonical URL tags which essentially tell search engines that it is not duplicate content.
Duplicate content issues can be quite a problem for WordPress website owners. However, with a few tweaks and plug-ins you can blog confidently without worrying about your site slipping down the search engine page results.
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