I have had these two plugins for a couple of weeks now and they are both ways to help fight the dreaded duplicate content penalties. For those of you who don’t know, search
engines (particularly Google, which people tend to worry about the most) don’t like duplicate content (meaning similar or same content) on multiple web pages. In fact, they often penalize sites and their rankings could suffer because of duplicate content penalties (which is why it is not a good idea to just copy wikipedia pages into your site).
Duplicate content can especially be a problem with blogs because of category pages, archive pages, and similar pages which have the same posts on them. Even slight variations in your url can lead to duplicate content penalties because search engines see each url as separate.
For example, http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com are viewed seperately and they may be indexed by a search engine separately. Of course you don’t want this either because it will lead to duplicate content penalties. Search engines may not realize that it is just a different way to sort the same information (or write the url) and they may penalize your site in their rankings. Its horrible, I know, but don’t worry there are ways to fight it.
This is where the two plugins come into play. The first plugin is called the “enforce www plugin”. What it does is pretty straight forward, you can probably already guess it from just hearing the name. It allows you to choose whether you want the www to show or not and it redirects links to your preference. This way only your preference will get indexed,
which means no duplicate content penalties! It also strips off the index.php from the end of urls (which is just another variation in your url that may cause problems). It is very simple to install and use and I recommend it to everyone.
The second plugin I have tells search engines not to index certain pages (such as archive and category pages) that have the same content as other pages which you do want indexed. It is called the “Duplicate Content Cure for Wordpress”. If you do want your category pages indexed, you can also turn it on (instructions on how to do this are on the
download page, located below).
So check them out, they are both easy to install so don’t worry about
that. You can grab them here: enforce www and wordpress duplicate content
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I have tells search engines not to index certain pages
that is a solution too..
Too bad!
I don’t have either of the plugins.. I’m tempted to try them now.
Thank you for posting these. I am going to try the second one I think.
Nice tool, thanks for sharing this type of tools. I’ll be using this to detect any duplicated content for my http://ww2db.com as it is the most content-rich of my sites.
Thanks for your recommend.The first one is exactly what I am looking for.
I’ve always used plug-ins to detect duplicate content issues, but it seems like Google should have no problem doing this on their own for Wordpress blogs. They say that they don’t want to create a search engine where only SEO experts can rank, but that’s exactly the situation that duplicate content issues with Wordpress would create. Unless you’re fairly tech-savvy, you’re never going to think to add a plug-in to deal with that.
But it’s usually easier to use a plugin like the one Stefan mentioned or an seo one like All in One SEO pack.
yes but why should google penalise duplicate content on the same domain I think they should ignore it rather than penalising it when its a common phenomenon
I better get around to installing the enforce www. It could impact me in the long term.
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