How to solve wordpress duplicate content for seo

WordPress duplicate content is very harmful when it come to seo, no search engine like seeing duplicate content especially google. For some reasons google search engine will assume your contents is either stolen articles and devalue you search result. On this article i am going to show you how you can stop duplicate content in wordpress.

Google introduce what is called google panda in 2011 and updated it 2013, what google panda does is to pad down low quality content from top of the search and bring high quality content to top of the search result, what this mean is that; if the machine discover that a website content is low then it will bring the entire website down on search result in other to take the high quality content website to the top of the search result, and the main reason google panda has been padding some website down even with their high quality content is the because of duplicate content. even if your website has good amount of traffic or rank how on google soon as google panda discover duplicate content on your website it will start bringing the whole website down on search engine result, you can read about google panda and how it work. learn more about google panda 

Other things that causes wordpress duplicate content

There are many reason that could make a website have duplicate content. Your website can generate duplicate content even if every content is been written by you, that is why we are going to look on how to stop internal wordpress duplicate content on website. On this article we will be looking at causes of internal duplicate content the solutions.

This is one of the most common reasons why duplicate content happen, When your website two url is showing the same page and index as different website, this will get google confuse and thought the website are two, for example when your website www and none www are been crawl and index by google as different website.

( e.g sitename.com
www.sitename.com)

these two url can be redirected to the same url and for browsers and human it a nice idea to have both of your www and none www website directed to one url for the reason of people who will not like going through the process typing the www.sitename.com and decide making it short way by typing sitename.com, but because google uses machine which doesn’t think like human or browser it will think the above url are different website. many webmasters will tell you to redirect your none www url to your www url, but that is not the new model way ofsolving this problem, currently now with google machine knowledge url redirection on ftt file will not solve the problem of duplicate content

Telling google you preferred your website to use is the main solution.
On your wordpress dashboard click on setting and navigate to general, on your website url change both to www.sitename.com and click save.
Go to your webmaster tool and login. learn about google webmaster console.
On top right side corner click the setting icon and navigate to website setting
when you are on website setting click prefer url and choose www.sitename.com as your preferred url, and that is all. if you are having problem setting your prefer url have then read this guild google webmaster preferred url setting.

Categories are another big causes of duplicate content that can drop down a website totally down on google search engines. categories are to specify your content to your readers for easy reading and understanding but if they are indexable by google search engines it can cause duplicate content. when categories are indexable google crawler will crawl through all your categories content and index them, at the time of index google will then notice some words which appear on categories has already been index on post content, google will then decide to take one down and show just one or even take both down on the search engines, google will also think that the website is not worthy been on top of search result since it having duplicate content. Now this is how google will take your website down out of search engines.

there are two specific method of stopping google crawling you website categories, but how do you know if categories was included pulling down your website on search engine?
It highly advisable to stop google from indexing your categories because it will surely affect your seo ranking if not now then in feature, but if you want to know if categories has contributed to the pull down of your website on google search engines, then goto google.com and type www.sitename.com on your search result take a look if you will see a category showing some part of your content which has already been shown of post.

As mentioned above there are two ways of getting this solve, either manual or using yoast plugin are the solution, if you have good knowledge of html and php you can solve it on your theme by telling google not to crawl categories but the easiest and best way considered is using yoast seo plugin. On this article i am going to show you how to stop google crawling your website categories using yoast seo.
Login wordpress dashboard and navigate to yoast seo and click “Titles & meta” and click “Taxomonies” on the categories put the meta robots to “noindex” and yoast mate box to “hide” click save and you are done.

Tag are also causes of duplicate content on your website, tags work like categories and as same as the solution we mentioned on categories, tag purpose was to arrange content properly for readers and if it also get index by google it can cause duplicate content.

The solution is as shown on categories. We are going to use the easy process to tell google not to index our tags, we are also going to use the yoast seo plugin in doing this.
Login wordpress dashboard and navigate to yoast seo and click “Titles & meta” then click “Taxomonies” scroll down to the tag section and turn meta robots to “noindex” and yoast meta box to hide.

Archive works is to tell readers how many post an author has archived, so that the readers can easily go through the posts author has archived, but if it’s indexable then it will definitely causes your website to have duplicate contents on search engines. archive also work on search engines as that of the categories and tags.

On your wordpress dashboard navigate to yoast seo and click “Titles & meta” then click archive and turn Author archives to “Enable” and Meta Robots to noindex.

almost all bloggers has done this, selecting multiple category for content, the people that does this often are news magazines and some other top bloggers. Reason are for the contents to get spread to many categories readers, for example some news blogs which has many categories such as Political, crime, government etc, and the blogger write an article on how a governor stole $2million, he/she might want the content to appear on political category, government category and crime category so readers who based reading each of the category can see it. Multiple category selection is good for readers but not for search engines because because search engines are going to index every post using it categories, and when come across same content on different category search engines will think it a duplicate content and drop down the ranking of that content and even the website.

The solution to this is easy, you should to able know if you want the content to get across to your readers or you want to rank in seo. If your website is huge and you are having direct visitors to your website then you have every reason getting your content across to your users and forget what google search engines think about it. You should know that you are writing for your blog visitors and not seo, so you should first think of how to please your visitors before thinking of how to please seo.

How to create meaningful category on wordpress

How to edit or delete category on wordpress

Canonical url is one of the first thing that you should look into your blog, It true that Canonical URL Tag is one of the important aspects of page seo. A URL could be accessed using:

http://sitename.com/1
http://sitename.com/1/
http://www.sitename.com/1
http://www.sitename.com/1/

All the URL’s point to the same post and that again generate duplicate content.
without going into much details we should look at the one time solution to this duplicate content problem. Even if it not yet affecting your website don’t think it might not affect it at all, prevention is better than cure.

to solve issues of Canonical Url Tag, add the code below to your theme header.php before <header> section.

<?php if ( is_singular() ) { ?>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” />
<?php } ?>

If you don’t know how to add code on your header.php then read how to add codes to wordpress header file This is how to solve wordpress duplicate content. after this you will need to tell google search console to pull down those your categories, tags, and archive that has already been index.
to do this read how to remove page from Google search engine.