David Pitlyuk sent words about a WordPress plugin that will help get you out of Google’s Supplemental index. The Duplicate Content Cure Plugin for WordPress is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing WordPress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.
It does this by adding the meta tag on the problem pages. Installation is very simple.
1. Download the plugin
2. Place the file duplicate-content-cure.php in your plugins directory
3. By default, category pages will have the noindex tag added. If you wish to allow your category paes to be indexed, just change the $index_category_pages variable in the duplicate-content-cure.php file. See the example below:Change
$index_category_pages = false;
to
$index_category_pages = true;4. activate it on the plugins page
That’s it. Say goodbye to those pesky duplicate content pages for good.
The plugin won’t replace a good robots.txt file but it’s very easy to use and will eliminate the biggest cause of duplicate content on a WordPress blog.
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All of these plugins are getting out of hand
I know … I can no longer keep up with even the smallest percentage. And it’s getting harder to choose which ones to ditch or keep!
John, wont this lead to the categories pages not getting any pr than?
Yes, but it can easily be made so that it does not block your category pages.
$index_category_pages = false;
to
$index_category_pages = true;
In the plugin edit.
Your categories pages are all dupe content anyways.
Exactly, there’s no reason to include category pages in Google (or other search engines) since they offer nothing of additional use to the SERPs.
I agree…the next upgrade, you will be deactivating all and activating all plugins…wait..there is a function to deactivate all…hail wordpress
This is interesting, I should check it for my own blog
I love them!
nice !! I guess I have to switch to WP soon
That looks like a nice plugin. I gonna install it on my new blog : http://gotchance.com
This is EXACTLY the reason why I love Wordpress.
Wow! I checked my supplementals just now, it’s over 50% of my pages! Yikes. I need to do something soon, to get this right!
And voila! This plugin is available. I got it downloaded. Trying it tomorrow!
Kenneth
Hey John, thanks for this! I’m trying to design a site using drupal but I’m being pushed further and further to use wordpress instead as it’s so much easier!! Do you know how I’d be able to use wordpress as a CMS instead of a blog??
It is possible to use Wordpress as a CMS. Both http://www.hardcoreware.net and http://www.thinkgaming.org are powered by wordpress.
Done!
Actually I think it’s much easier to disallow the G bot to browse most of your blog parts (categories, tags, pages) and allow it to crawl only the Archive. By doing so I think it’s possible to reduce the supplemental results a lot. I put a new robots.txt on yesterday and today I already have 60 pages less in the supplemental results than yesterday.
Another plug-in to the rescue — thanks for the tip, John!
I actually created a plugin that adds tag pages in google sitemap. Now after all these discussions about eliminating duplicate content I can see that my plugin is kind of useless and should not be used, but the google sitemap plugin still includes the category pages in the sitemap. Maybe it should not do that.
I just noticed that there are options you can set so that the google sitemaps plugin will not include categories and archives in your sitemap.
These plugins are getting out of hand…too many of them!.
There can never be enough plug-ins in the world…
Yeah, Wordpress is really useful. Thanks for posting this!
Interesting. I should give this a run and see if it works good.
I prefer to use the robots.txt, it’s one less plugin to care about.
I’m using it now, AND the robots.txt! Wonder if that’s overkill.
anyway. I checked to see if it’s working – there’s nothing to configure and no sign other than in plugins directory that it is working so to make sure I went to a category and opened the source code. Did a quick check for the noindex code. Sure it is there.
Don’t know if it will make a difference, currently 52% of my pages are in supplementals.
Mmm. let’s see.
If you use Feedburner there’s yet another feature to ensure Google doesn’t index the feeds: activating NoIndex in the Publicizing tab.
That’s a good tip! Mm. I’ll do that right away.
Awesome. This is great for those of us who have too many sites to keep updating the robots.txt file.
Another approach is use snippets on the category and tag pages, reserving the full post for the dedicated post page itself.
That puts interesting mashups of snippet contents on category and tag pages, indexable by the spiders.
As is usually the case, consider what is best for your readers first, and for G second.
Cheers
alan
My site doesn’t contain duplicate pages but still most of the pages comes in supplemental results. Can anyone help!!
Thank You
Another excellent plugin. My plugin folder is growing quickly here lately. Pretty soon, I’m going to need a Plugin to handle my Plugins!
Excellent plug-in I didn’t even know this existed. I’m sure this plugin will get a lot of installs since you made this post
John you must have a zillion plugins by now. Do they start to slow down wordpress after awhile?