In any way, you have to be a little careful about the SEO implications. If you are not careful, your wordpress site may end up being penalized by the search engines.
This is due to the duplicate content issue. The search engines have tweaked their algorithms to detect duplicate content within the same domain. And if they didn't like a particular website, they won't hesitate to tank the rankings or even in the worst case scenario, ban the website. So how to avoid being penalized?
The default Wordpress has got tags and categories included. Tags are keyword phrases that help web traffics find relevant content on your Wordpress site. In other words, they are like keyword searches. When you view a page with a tag listing, all pages with the presence of the keyword tags will be listed. Imagine having a blog post with numerous tags. That means the same content will be listed under a large number tags all at the same time.
Categories are more straight forward. When you publish content on your website, you can easily organize them into categories. When a web traffic clicks on a specific category, they will be able to view all blog posts that were published in that particular category.
Usually, only excerpts of the content will be listed. But that may be enough to trigger the search engine filters and looking the site into trouble.
SEO experts understand this trouble and the issue can be easily fixed with a little special Meta tags. Meta tags are special lines of code included in the web pages that are invisible to web traffics. They can be used to communicate with bots such as search bots and give special commands. In this case, we want to let the bots know that we do not want tags and category pages to be indexed. We then include "nofollow" and "noindex" Meta tags. Once search bots encounter these tags, they will not index the pages.
An alternative solution will be include a single line of code to all tags and category pages. This is commonly known as "canonical link". The canonical link points towards the original blog post. When the search bot encounters a canonical link, the original post will be taken as the primary content on the site. This will help Wordpress sites being flagged for duplicate content.
This may sound difficult to implement if you are unfamiliar with SEO and never want to meddle with Wordpress templates. In any way, you can install SEO plugins that will help you implement the above mentioned measures easily. All-in-one Platinum SEO is a popular plugin that is highly recommended. Once installed
, you can select the choice to deindex all tags and category pages.
