WordPress is one of the best possible tools at the disposal of bloggers today. However, there are some default settings which are still non-ideal and need to be fixed manually. Duplicate content is one of these. This is fairly important, because, in new blogs which primarily have only internal links, category and tag pages have the maximum number of links. This results in these pages getting higher rankings in search engine results as compared to your primary posts themselves. Read on to see how to solve the duplicate content issue in WordPress.
For this tip, you must have the Yoast SEO plugin installed, which is among our recommended list of must have WordPress plugins.
Solution to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues in WordPress
The simplest solution is to make all post types except posts and pages non-indexable. You can do this by going to the Titles and Metas section in Yoast SEO settings and set all Categories, Tags, Link Types’ Meta Robots field to ‘noindex’. See the screenshot below.
If you do have multiple posts with very similar content, then use the canonical URL tag. Though you must never have multiple pieces of content in different posts, at times, you may end up repeating content to say, answer a question about a topic in a separate post. In such cases, you should add the primary URL as the canonical URL in the non-primary post(s).
This simple tip can save you the trouble of getting search engines confused about which pages to show users in search results and will also save you loads of time in figuring out why your category pages are ranking higher than the original article.
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Recommended Reading: How many Ad Units to put in my Blog Post and How to Find Content Ideas for Your Blog.
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