Wordpress Noindex,follow Question

[JohnH]

With all the talk about wordpress and duplicate content (same content being on two or more different urls thanks to the archives and categories pages) everyone is saying to block the bots from the archives and categories pages... but what about a "noindex, follow" tag in the header?

It has me wondering about something.

If I noindex,follow these pages, do they pass any pagerank? Isn't that essentially telling google to follow the links on the page, but dont index the page? Would it be better to just block the bot from the archives and categories or is it essentially the same thing?

If the pages are kept from being indexed can they still pass pagerank/let it flow within the site?

Pretty confusing considering the archives and categories are the only ways for visitors and bots to reach the older posts on your site aside from actual links(and if it's a big site you can't link to every last page). Isn't it seen as cutting off a huge portion of your site if you block the bot from it's main path to the other pages?

Paraphrase for you non readers... is a noindex/follow tag different from blocking the bot from a page with the robots.txt file? and if so can pages that you noindex/follow allow page rank to pass through to other pages.

[OPB]

Its funny you bring up dup. content for WP. I watched a video on it last night (I found it very useful):

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/reducin...ordpress-blog/

I installed the excerpt plugin and changed some settings, it appears to be working. I'm still waiting for for the guy thats helping me with WP to get back to me. As for the NoIndex, I don't think those pages would pass any PR as in Google's eye that page wouldn't exist.

[Sebastien]

Guys,

This fear about duplicate content is not founded. There was a post from some Google engineer recently that shed light on this issue. This was posted in this SEO section as well (too tired to go dig it up).

The gist was that unless you are copying the exact same content from another website you will not be penalized. It's funny that people stress so much over this issue of duplicate content. Ever hear about someone get penalized because they have links to the archives on their blogs ?

Google may weigh some of your content less if it finds it in more than one location... but you will not be penalized. If Google finds something unique it will view it as precious, like a rare gem. If your site only reuses free articles from directories, Google may see it as a "common rock" but will not penalize you. I know this analogy is retarded . I'm just trying to make a point and you are asking a good question.

When you use rel="nofollow", visitors will still be able to click of course, but Google will be blocked. That means no link juice and no index. But it may be good to reduce the number of outgoing links a page has (say to the archives) because the links that are left will pump more juice.

To answer the last part of your post, sitemaps and internal linking will ensure that all your old posts are indexed (except those that you no-follow). I like submitting my sitemaps to high PR social media sites so they get visited often by Google. I also include a link to my sitemap.xml in the blog footer.

Hope this helps man, Cheers,

--Sebastien

[PPP]

"Google may weigh some of your content less if it finds it in more than one location... but you will not be penalized."

What would you call that lower weight? A bonus?

The point is duplicate content hurts. It can cause enormous ranking problems if Google picks the wrong canonical page.

Monthly archives are usually useless, from a search perspective. Nobody searches for [September 2005 poker posts]. get your content on the URLs you want, and then prevent anything duplicate from being indexed ever.

Not "fearing" duplicate content is suicidal. Eliminating duplicate content is job #1 when building a website properly.

[completepokerrules]

Check out this WP plugin to help with the duplicate content issue.

http://yoast.com/wordpress/robots-meta/

[SunPoker.com]

I split my articles up with the "more" tag and that seems to work just fine for getting rid of duplicate content.

I have posts that rank well in the engines after using the "more" function.

Mark

[JohnH]

Originally Posted by PPP

"Google may weigh some of your content less if it finds it in more than one location... but you will not be penalized."

What would you call that lower weight? A bonus?

I just laughed out loud. Having content ranked lower because it can be found in more than one place is the issue with duplicate content.

Ironically enough I just received an email from the abuse department of my hosting company telling me that someone got in and was having a hayday attacking/bruteforcing other servers from mine. This is the last time I will deal with this wordpress security bullshit.

The analogy my server admin used was "Using wordpress is like having a 30 room mansion in the ghetto with every single door and window unlocked. It's just a matter of time before someone gets in."

I am done with wordpress. Officially. It's great, but what good is it if it's not secure?

Back to basic html...

[Sebastien]

Hey guys,

We're just playing with words here. For me penalized meant Google giving a penalty, like -50 spots in the rankings, de-indexing, PR drop etc...

I agree with what you're saying now.

-Sebastien

[scrawnybob]

hi

I had the same panic a while ago as I'm doing all the sitting domains into small mini sites (so somthing is up) and read about the dupe content "issue" I cant find the links but alot were saying use plugins or tags etc and no follows

but one article stuck out to me as more logical way of doing it (dont ask me how to do it as I get someone to sort things from what I ask them not to do and what I want it do to)

the conclusion of the article was that using plugins or no follows was a bit of an over engineered way to do it and asking google not to index things wasn't in their opinion a logical way to solve the "problem"

instead make get rid of the "dupe content" on the category and archive pages by making them produce a summary of the original posts with links to full pages after x characters ... that way the category & archive pages are totally different from each other and not a dupe of the full post

hope this makes sense - and that way you dont have to get google to ignore 1/2 your site ... just making it different

cheers scrawnybob