I keep hearing people say that WordPress its great for SEO. It’s not, sorry to burst your bubble. Not out of the box anyway. And it’s not just about the CMS, it’s also about the themes that are available out there. Some are optimized, others are nightmares to work with.
Let’s take a look at the duplicate content issues from WordPress. When you write a post you have that content on the article’s own page (that’s good), on the front page, in the archives (the year pages, the month pages, the day pages), in the categories (one or more pages, depending on how many you pick for the article) and finally on the tag pages for those that use them. That’s a minimum of six places on your blog where you have the same article. That means pages marked as supplemental and category or archive pages that will rank for some keywords instead of the articles.
Especially true because while articles fall behind, archives and categories are always linked from all pages of your site, so they’ve got some extra authority to get out of supplemental hell.
What you need to do in this case is block certain pages from getting indexed. Categories are the best choice by far, because if your permalink looks like this: 2007/09/04/sample-post, if you block in robots.txt the 2007 folder you block the articles also. So be careful what you block.
Also, if you block both archive and category pages then you place a serious handicap on link juice flow across your blog. So, my suggestion would be to limit the blocking to just categories, and use an excerpt plugin to display just the first xx words of the articles on pages like archives and categories.
I use two WordPress plugins to solve this problem (only one of them on this blog):
All In One SEO Pack - you can choose to block certain pages by placing a no-index in the meta. Categories, archives, tag pages, you can choose which one you want blocked. Other options include displaying only the article title on individual pages, auto descriptions, meta keywords generated from categories or tags. I would suggest inserting your own descriptions and keywords for individual articles. I just forget 90% of the time so I leave them on to auto generate.
Post Teaser - lets you choose how many words you display on the main, archive and category pages for each article. This helps again with reducing duplicate content issues.
There are other plugins out there that can help you with SEO and there are optimized themes. Whatever you choose, don’t leave your WordPress installation as it is. It’s not optimized for SEO.
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