Duplicate Content and Google Panda

My previous post was on

Duplicate Content.

I mentioned that there were a couple of ways that, specifically WordPress, opens you up to the risk of duplicate content. Google, and the new Panda update, penalise websites and blogs for this. Google does not like duplicate content.

In my last post, we addressed the whole “Canonical” risks of duplicate content. For this post we will look at how posting your entire blog to your “home/blog” page puts you at risk, from a duplicate content point of view.

So, you write a post and publish… With WordPress, your new post “lives” on it’s own page, however, it also lives a “parallel life “on your “home/blog” page.

It actually also lives on a “tag” and “catergory” page (but this is for another post). So one post is essentially living on, up to four separate pages! Duplicate Content!… Read Google penalty!

One way to get around this, is to only post an excerpt of your posts to the “home/blog” page. This is not ideal, because you still have some duplication, however, it is minimized to a certain extent.

Ideally you want to be posting a unique excerpt, that you create seperateley, that links to your posts (in this way avoiding duplicate content altogether). However, most WordPress themes do not have this functionality.

So, the way to minimise this is to post just an excerpt onto your “home/blog” page.

This is how you do it:

After a few sentences or the first/second paragraph in your post, click the “more” button (as in the graphic). This will automatically create a “break” in your post when it is published to your “home/blog” page.

A link, normally, entitled “more” or “continue reading” will appear on this exceprt of the post that, when clicked will take you to the full post. This’ll minimise the Duplicate Content.

There are other ways to post only excerpts, but this is the simplest, in my opinion.

More on Duplicate Content to follow.