WordPress makes managing content easy, but WordPress duplicate content issues are super common because of this. How does WordPress duplicate content affect your search rankings?
Whether you realize it or not, chances are your website has at least some duplicate content. Perhaps it’s boilerplate/template elements that are used throughout your site, or maybe it’s excerpts taken from other sites. But how exactly does duplicate content affect a website’s search ranking?
Google has long stressed the importance of publishing unique, high-quality content, and for good reason: content is the driving force behind every successful website or blog. It gives people a reason to visit the website, and it helps search engines identify what the website is about. However, websites that consist primarily of duplicate content may experience difficulties in achieving a top search ranking for their target keywords.
The popular content management system (CMS) WordPress is notorious for creating duplicate content. When you create a new post, the platform automatically creates several “instances” of that post, including one under the category, tag, archive, and author, as well as the original post URL. So while you may think that WordPress is creating a single post, it’s actually creating nearly half a dozen duplicate posts. For example, on a poorly optimized WordPress blog, an article can be accessed by:
- http://www.domain.com/SEO-optimization
- http://domain.com/SEO-optimization
- http://domain.com/tag/SEO
- http://www.domain.com/tag/SEO
- http://domain.com/category/SEO
- http://www.domain.com/Category/SEO
- http://domain23.com/SEO-post (External website)
We’ve mentioned the YOAST SEO plugin many times in out blog and here again installing this simple plugin is the easiest way to remedy these types of duplicate content and it’s the quick fix to WordPress duplicate content issues such as these.
The simplest way to fix this issue it to use a great SEO plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast to automatically add those “follow, no-index” meta tags to all your archive pages. See the “SEO” > “Titles & Metas” settings page under the “Post Types” and “Taxonomies” tabs.
The good news is that search engines typically won’t penalize a website for small amounts of duplicate content. In fact, it’s estimated that roughly 30% of the entire Internet consists of duplicate content. If every website was penalized for it, the search results would look entirely different (and not in a good way!).
Video: Matt Cutts on Duplicate Content
Click the play button above to see Google’s former Webspam team leader answer the question: how does Google handle duplicate content? Cutts reveals Google’s method for indexing pages with duplicate content, saying it’s usually the first page that publishes the content to get ranked. Any websites or pages afterwards will generally now show up in Google’s search results.
Cutts goes on to say, however, that duplicate content can result in a rankings penalty. Instances such as this usually involve automated programs or software that scraps content from other sources and publishes it without the author’s consent. Known as “scraper sites” (for obvious reasons), they tend to contain nothing more that duplicate content that’s been rehashed across multiple websites.
This kind of content duplication can be checked and monitored by using a 3rd party service such as Copyscape. CopyScape offers a free URL search, with results coming in in just a few seconds. While the free version doesn’t do deep searches (breaking down the text in order to search for partial duplication) it does a thorough job of finding exact matches. If you have found two URLs or text blocks that appear similar, Copyscape has a free comparison tool that will highlight duplicate content in the text. While there is a limited number of searches per site with their free service, CopyScape’s Premium (paid) account allows you to have unlimited searches, deep searches, search text excerpts, search full sites, and monthly monitoring of plagiarism.
Aggregation VS. Scraping Content
WordPress has many seo benefits including plugins like WP RSS Aggregator, to help aggregate and feed relevant content to your own audience. This can be very beneficial in helping small blog build content to help slake their viewers appetite for more; however there is a fine line between aggregating content and scraping content (duplicating in whole) for the sake of rankings.
Plugins like WP RSS aggregator make it very easy to cross this line, as I found out for myself while testing. This plugin allows you to pull in full articles from any RSS feed supposedly with the appropriate attribution to the original author. Don’t be fooled. Reposting an article in full even with attribution is copying their content without approval and can be grounds for search removal action or even penalty. Biznology wrote a great in-depth article about this very thing titled, “Scraping vs. Aggregation: How to share other’s content.”
While I firmly believe people should share content the right way, should do you need to live in fear of those who have scraped your content?
Absolutely Not. You will definitely want to read Andy Crestodina’s article on blog.kissmetrics.com for a more detailed explination, but:
Scrapers don’t help or hurt you. Do you think that a little blog in Asia with no original writing and no visitors confuses Google? No. It just isn’t relevant.
Personally, I don’t mind scrapers one bit. They usually take the article verbatim, links and all. The fact that they take the links is a good reason to pay attention to internal linking. The links on the scraped version pass little or no authority, but you may get the occasional referral visit.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t worry too much about the negative effects of duplicate content. Unless you are scraping the content of other sites, or using other manipulative content generation techniques, even still it’s highly unlikely that you’ll penalized for it.
