Tackling duplicate content within WordPress

In the default setup, WordPress will generate some duplicate content. Duplicate content within a site undermines SEO efforts because it confuses search engines (which page of the duplicates is the page that should be indexed), and it may make your site appear low-value to search engines.

Here's how duplicate content is generated in a typical WordPress setup. Say you or another webmaster creates a Post titled Great Ways to Save Money on Beer, selects two categories (beer and money) for the Post and one Tag for the Post (saving money). When the Post is published, WordPress then does the following:

We don't want to disable these pages because they help users find content—but we have to find a way to control duplicate content to maximize our SEO efforts. There is one other wrinkle at work in this scenario. The 55-word excerpt that WordPress generates automatically for each Post (unless we create an excerpt manually for each Post), is generated from the first 55 words of the Post! So, the excerpt itself is a partial duplicate of the actual content! So, we have two problems:

If this duplicate content isn't controlled, a search engine might index your Tag index page instead of the content on the Post page itself—not an ideal scenario.

The answer is simple and solves the problem completely: a custom robots.txt file. Our custom robots.txt file will tell search engines not to index our category archive pages, our tag archive pages, and year and month archive pages. In the next chapter, we'll create the ultimate WordPress robots.txt file. With our robots.txt file, you'll solve these duplicate content issues and secure sensitive areas of your site.

We address the duplicate content in the excerpt by going the extra mile and taking the time to write excerpts for all Posts. To write an excerpt for a Post, simply scroll down from the main edit window when composing a Post and find the box titled Excerpt.

Overcoming landing page customization limitations

WordPress does not offer a simple and elegant way to create custom landing pages. It's helpful to understand the nuts and bolts of how WordPress creates pages. When a user browses your site, WordPress generates a few different sections to compose the page. With 99 percent of all WordPress sites, this works as follows: WordPress generates the header, then the content area (the actual content, such as your blog post or contact page), followed by the sidebar, and finally the footer.

In some cases, a WordPress site will have two sidebars instead of one, or an additional element such as a fancy slider under the header, but the method remains the same. Generally, only the content area changes from page to page, the other elements remain the same regardless of what page is requested.

Increasingly, with more advanced frameworks and templates that have emerged in recent years, the WordPress admin area will offer the ability to rearrange and edit individual sections. Your template or framework may offer increased capabilities. Essentially, the decision to use an advanced framework for your WordPress site will boil down to the following: more powerful frameworks deliver more features, but have a higher learning curve.

WordPress ships with a default template, and this default template changes every year. For the year 2015, WordPress shipped with the Twenty Fifteen template. It's a good idea to play with this default template on a sandbox installation (a throw-away, temporary installation) to learn about how to manage a WordPress installation.

With Joomla!, by comparison, pages are constructed with a far more flexible and complex system based on modules. This module-based system means that webmasters can create and utilize different components within modules on different pages. For example, a Joomla! sidebar can have, say, a newsletter sign up box only on particular pages—the webmaster designates the pages on which the sidebar will appear. WordPress' approach is simpler, but less flexible.

WordPress obviously allows you to change the appearance of the content area page-by-page. Page-by-page changes in the other elements of your website, the header, footer, and sidebar, are possible but require the coding of custom templates, or the use of an advanced framework or template.

This limitation can limit your ability to easily and quickly create fully customized, highly graphical landing pages.

Understanding the limitations of page-by-page navigation

In addition, WordPress limits the flexibility with which you can create page-by-page navigation. You may have noticed this effect when browsing WordPress sites: the navigation menus remain fixed and constant as you browse throughout the site. Generally, WordPress will call your sidebar when it generates a page. That sidebar is defined by the choice of sidebar widgets you make, within the appearance section (from your WordPress dashboard, select Appearance, then Widgets). Furthermore, the use of the nofollow attribute is generally not possible with WordPress' dynamically-generated navigation menus. Multiple variations of sidebars are certainly possible, but require that either custom templates to be coded or a framework/template with drag-and-drop capability be employed. There is no menu selection that can accomplish this.

There is a hidden benefit to these limitations, you can't mess up what you can't customize.

That said, with experience, customizing your navigation can bring great optimization benefits. The goal with navigation architecture is to sculpt the flow of PageRank to increase the flow to your highest value pages, and to restrict the flow of PageRank to low-value pages like your privacy policy and contact pages. In larger sites, dead zones can develop, areas where search spiders have difficulty crawling and indexing. While this doesn't occur often in WordPress sites, customized adjustments in navigation will generally fix the problem.

Some users will find the restrictions in customization inconvenient, others will never notice.