Control WordPress Duplicate Content with Excerpts

The SEO world is rife with misinformation and one example is the issue of duplicate content. How Google handles duplicate content is often misunderstood. Webmasters fear the dreaded dup content penalty, but actually, there is no such thing as a dup penalty. However, the way that Google handles duplicate content can sometimes mimic a penalty, thus causing confusion and the spread of misinformation.

So how does Google handle duplicate content? Google understandably doesn’t see a need for presenting the same content multiple times in search results. So when Google finds more than one page with the same content, it decides which of the pages is the best choice (hint: PageRank is a key factor here), and that is the page that appears in the search results. If that is NOT the page you’d prefer to see show up, then you may believe that the page you worked so hard on has been penalized. It hasn’t, but the net effect is the same. Your prized page is not being shown to searchers.

Google has mentioned many times that they strive to choose the best page to present to searchers, but they agree that if you want to take that decision out of Google’s hands, then you need to prevent duplicate content from appearing on your site in the first place. Obviously, we are talking about internal duplicate content, as that is what you have control over. If other sites are stealing your content, you need to take other measures. Kevin gives good tips on dealing with scum-sucking scrapers here.

If you’re a blogger using WordPress, you may have lots of duplicate content on your site. WordPress defaults to displaying the full post in many different places. For the purposes of controlling duplicate content, what you really need to do is to only display the full post in one place – the single.php page. You’ll need to eliminate the full post being displayed on the home page, archive page, categories page, and search page. Sure, lots of people choose to display full posts on the home page, and there are some legitimate user issues that may warrant you deciding to continue to do so. But if you want full control over what page gets chosen for a query in Google, you’ll need to reconsider that position. If you decide to display partial posts on all pages except single.php, there are various ways of accomplishing that task. I usually use the most direct route, and that’s what I’ve presented here.

The easiest way to rid your blog of duplicate content is to simply display excerpts rather than full posts on every page except single.php. You would be replacing:

<?php the_content(__(‘Read the rest of this entry »’)); ?>

with:

<?php the_excerpt() ?>

on your theme’s pages such as search.php, categories.php, and archive.php.

That will quickly solve the duplicate content problem everywhere except the home page. You could, of course, do the same thing on the home page, but there’s a better solution for that, and it involves a plugin. I recommend using the WordPress Excerpt Editor Plugin.

The WordPress Excerpt Editor Plugin’s main function is to allow you to easily edit excerpts, but its auxiliary functions are the real reasons I recommend it. It comes with some great options that allow you to customize how the excerpts are displayed on the home page. The standard WordPress excerpt strips out all formatting, images, and links, and is set at a fairly short length. Excerpt Editor allows you to decide how long the excerpt will be, and what the excerpt will include. You can choose to show images, links, styling, etc., and can also include a Read More link (which is missing from the standard WordPress excerpt implementation). Having this kind of control enables you to give your readers more without causing duplicate content problems. (If you don’t manually type excerpts when you create posts, Excerpt Editor will automatically create them from the posts themselves.)

Notes:

You could use the tag in your posts to only show excerpts up to that point on the home page. That works perfectly fine if you want complete control over the exact cutoff point of every post. I personally don’t want to have to make that decision every day, so I prefer the automation that Excerpt Editor provides.

In addition, Kevin also discusses Daily Blog Tips’ newest plugin here, which accomplishes similar goals, but I haven’t tried that one yet.

Written by dazzlindonna from SEO Scoop
Posted on September 8th, 2007 and filed under Search Engine Optimisation
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