We have heard of people copying our content and lot has been discussed about how to fight against it.
But today we are going to see, how our own blog will be penalized for having the same content accessible from two different URL of the same blog.
For example, if you are showing the full content of your post in all the locations like, Homepage, Archives page, and in single content page(single.php), then there is all possibility of Search Engines thinking that these contents are duplicate. Thus there is a high chances of getting penalized.
Daniel Scocco has a nice video to illustrate this concept. So take a look, before we deal with the permalinks contribution for creating duplicate content.
That was a very informative video.
Today lets take a look at some other ways, from which your wordpress website may get penalized for having duplicate contents.
This applies for those people who are using the permalink structure which includes “Categories” ( /%category%/ ).
Previously I had this http://technotip.org/%category%/%postname%/ permalink structure. I had thought that, having the category name in the URL would help the search engines, as they might consider it as a keyword to that article.
But later I realized that, there is a huge drawback from using such permalink structure. I realized this, when I typed the URL of one of my article wrongly and was still able to access that article.
I had an article at http://technotip.org/SEO/killer-seo-list/ and I had typed the URL wrongly as http://technotip.org/general/killer-seo-list/ , but to my astonishment, the article just showed up. With confusion in my mind, I just had a quick search in Google, to see that the wrong URL http://technotip.org/general/killer-seo-list/ was also indexed. Now I really started worrying, if all other posts had the same problem. So searched again for other posts, but everything was OK with other posts. Then why this problem with http://technotip.org/SEO/killer-seo-list/ ?
I just went to my wordpress Dashboard and saw that I had got a link back to the wrong URL http://technotip.org/general/killer-seo-list/ from some blog and Google had indexed it(as the article was accessible at that wrong URL, so no fault of Google here).
Now I continued the search, and saw some other blogs using the permalink structure similar to my blog. Now I just changed the Category name and tried to access their posts, to my wonder, they were also accessible. And many of those sites did not have the nofollow or noindex in their category section. Thus, those sites are in danger, of getting penalized.
If you are also using the permalink structure
http://yoursitename.com/categories/postname/ then just change the “categories” name to any name you like(it may be anything that exists or not exists in your category list) and hit enter. You will still be able to access the article.
This can be solved
1. By having the permalink structure http://yoursitename.com/postname/ .
2. Redirect it to the original post.
Changing the permalink of your blog.
Just change the file permission of .htaccess and index.php files in the root directory to 666.
And then login to your wordpress account and click on settings then on Permalinks option and now select Custom Structure and put /%postname%/ and finally click on Save Changes button. This will make your permalink structure as http://yoursitename.com/postname/ .
And redirecting the URL to original URL can be done by a number of plugins out there. Just click here to have a look.
Note: As all those articles are placed in one or the other categories, introducing the nofollow or noindex to your categories section will make the article inaccessible to search engines and finally you will end up with no search engine traffic.
I have heard most of the times that, many blogs have good page ranking in the beginning, but after sometime those rankings will drop and will keep on dropping with time. This is because as time goes and your number of posts increases, the number of duplicate contents are also increased. Thus, search engines penalize your page ranking over time.
The final thing to be kept in mind is that, always remember that your goal is to make sure that your posts or articles can be accessed in full from only one location inside your site.
Following these simple and effective tips will surly yield good results in the long run.
What do you think about duplicate contents.Have you also encountered with the same problem? And do you have any other solution for this kind of problems? or have you encountered any similar problems? please share it with us, in the comment section.