This is a continuation of my WordPress Search Engine Optimization Masterclass . It is really the one missing component, other than a complete theme with everything built in, to achieve the linking structures I described in my previous article.
Sandcastles Theme
I am still playing around with my Sandcastles Theme on a test site (based upon Sandbox) – it will be released fairly soon, but not until I have this site moved over onto new servers.
I thought I would release this now so that those who don’t want to work with a modified Sandbox theme are free to use it, and most people can probably gain some benefit from it anyway, as it will reduce external links on duplicate content pages without having to block them.
Pagerank is based upon pages and relevant links – if you can make all those duplicate content pages unique, and prevent them from leaking too much Google Juice, they are actually useful content for your readers, and you can benefit from having them indexed.
Here are the full release notes for NoFollow Those Dupes , and a direct download link for those chomping at the bit.
11 Comments
Andy,
Would you say that plugin would work the best with Sandcastles Theme? Or could you experiment on basically any theme?
It is a case of looking at your duplicate content pages and seeing how many internal and external links are within your content, and in your sidebar.
If someone has loads of external links in their sidebar, and very few internal links (an extreme case), then sticking nofollow on lots of internal linking within the content would not be ideal.
That is why it is possible to change the default (all links) to skip adding nofollow on the internal links.
Great post. By supporting RSS feed in your website, you are allowing other users to copy your content and public your content in their websites. As the result, your content is being duplicated. Everybody knows search engines don’t like duplicated content. In consequence, I don’t really understand the advantages to support RSS feed.
Hey Andy I use your plugin and I wrote a post about it as my first tip on ways to improve PageRank.
This has proved to be an excellent tool. I am redesigning my personal web site with articles that should prove helpful to many of my clients since I can’t help everyone with everything that need to have done–too busy. I have found in the past that it’s very difficult to keep Google out of the picture on certain items and to keep it from duplicating and then deleting links and pretending they’re spam just because they appear twice in the same web site. I’m fairly certain that it’s not the way I want to be remembered on Google or anywhere else. One of the things I do is write niche artcles for other clients occasionally. How do I keep google out of those? I have tried the no follow, but it doesn’t seem to keep Google from squeezing the very life out of the projects in my portfolio which is not helpful for my clients. Do I need to add each piece of my portfolio to my robot.txt file?
This sounds like a good plugin. I’ve been struggling to understand exactly how to correct the WP dupe content problem. I don’t exactly understand what this plugin does though.
Does it just add nofollows to the archives etc. or what? I would think that the archives and category pages are good for the crawling of a blog so in a way they are good and I wouldn’t want to block the bots from them. But, then again, is it going to hurt the blog having 3 or more URL’s with the exact same content…
Do I have to wait for SandCastle theme before I can make use of this plugin? Or is this OK for all themes I choose at WP?
This will work with any theme
Confused..
Hi Andy..
Please can you explain this.. I am no SEO whizkind and this is confusing me… according to the below every time I post I am duplicating the content 3 times? will I be penalized for this.. I notice your pages that are tagged are also shown twice..
Please can you tell me if this is good or bad..
1.
this is my post page which is fine..
http://www.mydomain.com/category/page-title/
……………………………………..
2.
this is the page that the tag cloud links to
my page duplicated here?
http://www.mydomain.com/tag/page-title/
…………………………………………
3.
this is the category page.. my page is displayed here
http://www.mydomain.com/category/page-title/
………………………………………………….
this means my content is displayed 3 times doesn’t it?
Kindest regards David
Andy,
I read this about 6 months ago as a noob, and understood little. Now I get it.
But what is your opinion on whether it is better to…
1. nofollow WP dupes, or
2. use a robots.txt file to simply disallow indexing of archive pages?
Great post. By supporting RSS feed in your website, you are allowing other users to copy your content and public your content in their websites. As the result, your content is being duplicated. Everybody knows search engines don’t like duplicated content.
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