Should you delete archives to avoid duplicate content?

[Jakehyten]

I thought i remember reading somewhere that it is a good idea to get rid of your archives in a wordpress blog to avoid duplicate content? Is this true? Is there any adverse effect of deleting your archives as far as seo goes?

Or should i just use that dupe content plugin wordpress has?

Thanks

[JayXtreme]

Yes...

You should get rid of them and it is a problem.. but there is more to it than simply "deleting" the archives..

It is much better to work on some noindex tags in your robots.txt file for various duplication of content...

Something like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /k/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.pdf$
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$
Disallow: /*.php*
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.txt$
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /wp-*
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /k/
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /*

** DISCLAIMER **:

I just drafted that from memory.. please do your own research for a full list, I don't have time to dig into mine right now

Peace

Jay

[Jakehyten]

hmmm, that looks pretty confusing. I could probably hire someone to do that right?

[bgmacaw]

Use Platinum SEO or All-in-One SEO and it will take care of this.

But, in general, Google's algorithms understand WordPress sites quite well and won't penalize you for the archival duplicate content.

[Abledragon]

I agree with bgmacaw...

If you read Google Webmaster's Guidelines you'll see that Google understands how blogs work and they're not going to zap you for duplicate content on your own site.

Apart from which, it's not duplicate content. It's simply different ways of accessing the same content on the same site.

The duplicate content that causes so much angst is identical content on different sites.

If you jump down to comment #9 on the post I've linked to below, there are some details on how to set up the All-in-one-SEO-pack (which I do recommend) including a discussion on duplicate content on blogs. Here's the link:

http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/20...ne-seo-plugin/

The good stuff is in comment #9.

Cheers,

Martin.