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WP Duplicate COntent - Am I FORCED to Show Excerpts Only?

by TiffanyLambert
22 replies
I keep getting conflicting opinions from a couple of people - wanted a consensus.

If I'm posting on a WP blog, categorizing the content and using tags, do I HAVE to show an excerpt only or risk getting dinged for duplicate content?

Sounds kind of ridiculous to me but wth, I'm not a Googlebot.
#content #duplicate #excerpts #forced #show
  • Profile picture of the author redfoxseo
    You need to use excerpts and add your own words to make it unique.
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  • Profile picture of the author ladida
    I'm interested in thoughtful opinions on this matter as well. Still assessing the viability of autoblogging...
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  • Profile picture of the author TSDMike
    Originally Posted by TiffanyDow View Post

    I keep getting conflicting opinions from a couple of people - wanted a consensus.

    If I'm posting on a WP blog, categorizing the content and using tags, do I HAVE to show an excerpt only or risk getting dinged for duplicate content?

    Sounds kind of ridiculous to me but wth, I'm not a Googlebot.
    Tiffany,

    There is no duplicate content penalty. There's no harm in a chunk of your article showing up on your homepage.

    That said, instead of using the excerpt box, I would use the 'more' tag. The WP plugin TINY MCE has a button for it, or you can click the HTML tab on your post and insert it that way.

    Just stick the more tag whereever you want the post to cut off and you're done. It's especially nice if you want to preserve images, blockquotes and the like in what displays on your homepage.

    If you need a tutorial, a quick Google search for "More tags in wordpress" will turn up what you need.
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    • Profile picture of the author TiffanyLambert
      Originally Posted by TSDMike View Post

      Tiffany,

      There is no duplicate content penalty. There's no harm in a chunk of your article showing up on your homepage.

      That said, instead of using the excerpt box, I would use the 'more' tag. The WP plugin TINY MCE has a button for it, or you can click the HTML tab on your post and insert it that way.

      Just stick the more tag whereever you want the post to cut off and you're done. It's especially nice if you want to preserve images, blockquotes and the like in what displays on your homepage.

      If you need a tutorial, a quick Google search for "More tags in wordpress" will turn up what you need.
      If there's no penalty, is there any reason I'd want to do excerpts? I'm uber lazy
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      • Profile picture of the author tht222
        Originally Posted by TiffanyDow View Post

        If there's no penalty, is there any reason I'd want to do excerpts? I'm uber lazy
        It depends - by default WP ads ten posts per page, so if all your posts are super-long and say 900 words each and you want to keep the default, you are better off using excerpts IMO.

        When I see a page so long that it takes me half an hour to scroll down to the bottom, I typically hit the "back" button in a split second .... longer pages also take longer to load as well, especially if you have images or videos in your posts.
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        • Profile picture of the author TiffanyLambert
          Originally Posted by tht222 View Post

          It depends - by default WP ads ten posts per page, so if all your posts are super-long and say 900 words each and you want to keep the default, you are better off using excerpts IMO.

          When I see a page so long that it takes me half an hour to scroll down to the bottom, I typically hit the "back" button in a split second .... longer pages also take longer to load as well, especially if you have images or videos in your posts.
          Ah okay. No I keep it at 3 blog posts shown and each is only about 200-250 words.

          Thanks everyone!
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          • Profile picture of the author sylviad
            Hi Tiffany,

            My WP blog theme automatically posts as an excerpt on the main page which then links to the full article inside. Not sure what makes that happen - whether it's the theme itself or one of the plugins, like All In One SEO maybe.

            Regardless, the benefit is that it's automatic without my doing anything more than adding my post once.

            It's this blog, if you want to see how it works:
            Natural Anxiety Remedies
            That's the Corporate Theme.

            I've read here before that if your article is in more than one category it can constitute duplicate content. Don't know if that's true or not. I thought it simply categorized one article so that it appears from one source into each category - so in other words, the article is really only on your site once.

            Sylvia
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  • Profile picture of the author joshuagan80
    What is your purpose for having a WP duplicate content? If you want lots of visitors to your site, I would advise having more unique content in your site, and search engines love it.
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  • Profile picture of the author waken
    Well, I pay little attention to this duplicate content issue. To me, as long as the content that I'm posting is unique, and not repeated (full articles) a few times on my sites, I trust that it should be ok.

    It doesn't matter how many times excerpt from the full article is being copied when I put them into different categories or under various different tags. The bot is made to be as human as possible, so if your content looks alright to a real human reader, bots will love it too.. I suppose.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kael41
    Excerpts to me have always been the teaser text to read more. Nothing else. I don't use them to avoid the dupe content penalty (if there ever was one).
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  • Profile picture of the author ryanwsi
    I'm not quite sure about duplicate content on other websites(Article Syndication) but duplicate content across your website is definitely a no-no and this is according to Google.
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Originally Posted by sylviad View Post

      Hi Tiffany,

      My WP blog theme automatically posts as an excerpt on the main page which then links to the full article inside. Not sure what makes that happen - whether it's the theme itself or one of the plugins, like All In One SEO maybe.

      Regardless, the benefit is that it's automatic without my doing anything more than adding my post once.

      It's this blog, if you want to see how it works:
      Natural Anxiety Remedies
      That's the Corporate Theme.

      I've read here before that if your article is in more than one category it can constitute duplicate content. Don't know if that's true or not. I thought it simply categorized one article so that it appears from one source into each category - so in other words, the article is really only on your site once.

      Sylvia
      Sylvia, if you have separate templates for your front page and your posts, it's very easy. Look in the Wordpress loop, and you'll see a variable called the_post. Change that to the_excerpt and save. Now your front page will show the post excerpts rather than the full posts.
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      • Profile picture of the author sylviad
        Originally Posted by JohnMcCabe View Post

        Sylvia, if you have separate templates for your front page and your posts, it's very easy. Look in the Wordpress loop, and you'll see a variable called the_post. Change that to the_excerpt and save. Now your front page will show the post excerpts rather than the full posts.
        Thanks, John.

        In the site I mentioned, it automatically only shows the latest post in excerpt format. I didn't do anything to make that happen. The problem I DO have is that the blog only shows an excerpt for the latest post and not 10 excerpts of 10 posts as it says I can do. I've set for more than 10 and it still only shows one.

        Re the duplicate posts in categories, I thought it worked this way:

        You make a post, click a category or 2.
        Your post is only in one place until someone clicks a new category and it draws it from the archives. So it's not really on all the pages. It only appears on one page at a time. Kinda like the old Frames?

        Is my logic Weird... or What?

        Sylvia
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        • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
          Originally Posted by sylviad View Post

          Thanks, John.

          In the site I mentioned, it automatically only shows the latest post in excerpt format. I didn't do anything to make that happen. The problem I DO have is that the blog only shows an excerpt for the latest post and not 10 excerpts of 10 posts as it says I can do. I've set for more than 10 and it still only shows one.

          Re the duplicate posts in categories, I thought it worked this way:

          You make a post, click a category or 2.
          Your post is only in one place until someone clicks a new category and it draws it from the archives. So it's not really on all the pages. It only appears on one page at a time. Kinda like the old Frames?

          Is my logic Weird... or What?

          Sylvia
          Sylvia, on your first question, it's something probably coded into your theme's template. That will override the settings you make in the control panel.

          On the duplicate posts question...

          This might help clear things up:

          Correct use of link rel="canonical" - Webmaster Central Help
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        • Profile picture of the author mrdomains
          You do not have to go the excerpt way and limit your first page to shortened versions of the posts. Google knows how WP works.

          About the posts.. they actually only exist in one "place" but can be represented/shown with different urls depending on how you categorize/tag your posts. Google will usually take one of the excisting urls and use that to index your post in the serps. The rest of the urls it will ignore. This is not penalizing, just serp organizing, so no harm done.

          If you feel your want to be sure Google gets it right, you can indicate a preferred url by using the canonical meta tag for the post. One benefit of this is that you concentrate rank power, link juice, etc, to that url.

          You can activate this in a couple of seo plugins such as WordPress SEO Plugin - Yoast


          Matt Cutts mentions canonical urls briefly at about 43.30

          SEO site review session from Google I/O 2010
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  • Profile picture of the author Istvan Horvath
    the_content > the_excerpt.

    In some themes it is done like that by designer.

    Regardless, I remember an interview with Matt Cuts from G. where he was talking exactly about this issue: posts appearing on
    - your home page
    - monthly archives
    - category archives
    etc.

    He said (should try to find the original):
    a) they know blogging software work in this way
    b) G. is able to recognize that the "duplication" is due to the software
    c) G. will pick only ONE of those pages to be listed
    d) [this is the part nobody wants to listen to!!] - if they see that the duplication is not malicious or to trick G or something like that... innocent bloggers will not be punished for the blogging tool

    HTH
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Istvan, I remember seeing that as well. If memory serves, he mentioned using a rel=canonical tag in the header to specify the url you wanted indexed, otherwise the algorithm would assign one.
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  • Profile picture of the author taylormarek
    I don't see how you'd get dinged for duplicate content if all you're doing is writing a post and assigning categories and tags to it. If you over-do it you might.

    I've used excerpts on my homepage (along with All-In-One-SEO plugin) and found, if anything, you might get a double ranking. One for your homepage where the googlebot found the search query and another one for the direct post itself.

    Usually the unique posts have a higher chance of ranking higher in Google compared to autoposts/generic sites. That's just from what I've found so far.
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  • Profile picture of the author sarahberra
    I love your videos Tiffany! I am one of your email and video subscribers! I LOVE you!!

    I will tell you what I do. I simply keep all of my sites unique. There is so much conflicting info about duplicate content so I think the safest way is just to keep everything unique. It may take more time, but this is what I am comfortable with. I know you sell a lot of PLR and I think that's great, but I don't use PLR since I can write the content myself. I think I would need to change the PLR quite a bit to make it unique. I might buy PLR in the future, but for now I want to keep it all unique. I have bought IPK through your link though and I might buy this new deadbeat affiliate product that you just starting talking about in your videos. Keep up the good work. Sorry for going off topic.
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    • Profile picture of the author mrdomains
      Just to clarify. I doesn´t matter what material we are talking about - Tiffany´s original blog posts on her own blog or the excellent PLR material we buy from her and use on our own blogs. All of it is ok as long as we keep to 1 rule:

      The only time you can get penalized is if you create multiple posts with the same material on your site.

      If you make 1 post and then categorize and tag it, it will show up/be listed, in multiple "places" like the archive page, the tag page, the original post, etc. This is fine because it is still only 1 post - it is simply being shown in multiple places which is sort of a navigational feature.

      If you however take that same post and create a totally new, additional post on the same site, then you may get penalized for duplicate content. "Duplicate content" means just that. if you try to get massive amounts of pages indexed by simply copying the same text from each one (on your own site) then that is obviously frowned upon.

      If the same content is found on diferent sites however, there is no penalty. The only thing that might happen is that your page with that material (also found on other sites) may not be the one chosen to be indexed. No penalty, but also no exposure. Often though, Google will index a bunch of sites with the same content.

      Try taking any text on ezinearticles, copy a sentence or two, go to google and past the text int the search box between ""

      See all the sites it has included in the serp with the identical text? No duplicate content penalty

      Once again - penalty only relates to content used in several identical posts. If you make 1 post and this one then shows up multiple times on your site under categories / tags/etc - this is not a problem to worry about.

      @ CCGAL
      Excellent video
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  • Profile picture of the author CCGAL
    I thought this explained duplicate content very well:




    Hope this helps.
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