You might be knowing that Google have already implented and continuosly implementing their new feature called, Google Panda to enhance their search results and Google Panda is slapping websites having duplicate content. It means to stand out from the crowd, you have to have original contents on your website.
Now, you might be thinking that I am writing original articles then Why I Should worry about Google Panda updates. Yes, you are right but the fact is that, you are unknowingly creating duplicate content in your wordpress blog. It’s because WordPress have TAG, Category, Archieve pages by default. So, Suppose you are publishing an article on your blog then first few lines, may be 5-6 depending on your theme, will appear on all those 3 pages and also on home page of your blog. It means same 4-5 lines of content is showing everywhere and also it will show in your google search results if you are not using Meta description for your post.
In addition, suppose you are sharing your post on facebook then it will show the same few lines as description, if you are not using meta description feature.
So, Finally same content is appearing on so many places that will reduce the originality of your main article and hence you may not get good SERP.
To use this feature, whenever you are writing a post, go to the bottom/middle of that page where you can see an option to write excerpt for this page. You can write a small description about the post which will appear everywhere instead of your main content.
You can search with the highlighted term in the above screenshot, excerpt_length and change the digit to less. I will suggest to keep it between 20-30 because then it will show just your first line of content.
So, these two small tricks you can follow in your wordpress blog to reduce duplicate content issue.
Your comments are always welcome. Let us know if you know some other ways to reduce the duplicate content issue for wordpress.
Now, you might be thinking that I am writing original articles then Why I Should worry about Google Panda updates. Yes, you are right but the fact is that, you are unknowingly creating duplicate content in your wordpress blog. It’s because WordPress have TAG, Category, Archieve pages by default. So, Suppose you are publishing an article on your blog then first few lines, may be 5-6 depending on your theme, will appear on all those 3 pages and also on home page of your blog. It means same 4-5 lines of content is showing everywhere and also it will show in your google search results if you are not using Meta description for your post.
In addition, suppose you are sharing your post on facebook then it will show the same few lines as description, if you are not using meta description feature.
So, Finally same content is appearing on so many places that will reduce the originality of your main article and hence you may not get good SERP.
How to Reduce Duplicate Content Issue
To overcome this problem, you can do these few changes inside your wordpress admin area.1. Use Custom Excerpt Feature of WordPress
Excerpt is an optional, summary of your post, which if you are using will show the same summary on home page, tag page, category page, archive page and if you are sharing any where, it will show this excerpt, instead of your main content from main article. So, your main article is completely original now.To use this feature, whenever you are writing a post, go to the bottom/middle of that page where you can see an option to write excerpt for this page. You can write a small description about the post which will appear everywhere instead of your main content.
2. Decrease the Length of Default Excerpt
If you don’t want to write custom excerpt for each of your posts because you already having 100′s of posts and it will take a long time to edit all, then you can decrease the length of default excerpt. You can find the length of excerpt defined in your theme’s function.php file.You can search with the highlighted term in the above screenshot, excerpt_length and change the digit to less. I will suggest to keep it between 20-30 because then it will show just your first line of content.
So, these two small tricks you can follow in your wordpress blog to reduce duplicate content issue.
Your comments are always welcome. Let us know if you know some other ways to reduce the duplicate content issue for wordpress.
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