Thanks for linking to my blog – appreciated.

It’s funny you mention dupprevent and plugins for wordpress – dupprevent seems to be no longer supported, so I’ve adapted it and released a new version – SEO_wordpress – you can read more about it and download here

Just a little hint – if you use this plugin, make sure you delete any pre-existing robots.txt you have first – it will set one up for you automatically.

As for the comments by the troll on my blog – ignore them. I was being uncharacteristically nice that day – wildcards (ie stars) in robots.txt are supported by the major search engines – if you don’t believe me, try using the robots.txt checker in google webmaster tools to make sure.

Another little tip – if you’re using wordpress, use the ‘optional excerpt’ or ‘more tag’ so that your full text is not shown on the index page. It helps Google work out that the real content it should index is on your individual post pages.

Cheers,

theDuck

Hello, Jack …

Well, if it was me, I’d start here, with the idea that, if I was a search engine, then I wouldn’t want, let’s say, four instances of the same page in my database.

But, since I’m a search engine, I can’t figure out which one of the four I should keep, so I solve the problem by throwing them all out. Simple!

So, if you don’t want all four of your pages thrown out, then you just tell the search engine which one you want to keep. Simple!

Does this mean that the other 3 pages won’t still be on your blog?

No, it doesn’t. They’re still “there”. Real, regular people can still see them … and link to them … and you’ll still get credit for those links.

They’re just not in the search engines because you had the good sense to use meta name = “robots” content=”noindex, follow” in your page headers for the other three instances so the search engines will know that that the content isn’t for them. Simple!

Of course, if it’s after the fact … if you’ve been building a blog for years and have thousands of pages … then it’s a job of work to go in there and edit the code to conform to this concept.

But then again, if you’ve been blogging for years, you probably have lots of “link love”, and it’s my understanding, from reading a transcript of Google’s Matt Cutts, that lots of backlinks covers a multitude of sins and saves you from “Supplementals Hell”.

Still, if you’re just starting up, or have only been blogging for just a few months, it seems to me like it wouldn’t hurt to tell the search engines which links to index and which links to leave alone.

That way, the search engines are happy because there’s only one instance of any given page of yours in their results, and you’re happy because all of your pages are *both* listed *and* available to your visitors in several cross-referenced categories.

Warmest regards …

Elizabeth

P.S.

It’s my understanding that “quality of content” per se really isn’t the issue because, apart from obvious keyword stuffing or something black-hat like that, the spiders really can’t judge content quality. So the only thing the search engines have to fall back on in that regard is “link love”, on the theory that people wouldn’t link to you if they didn’t love you. This seems a rather fatuous assumption to me, but then I’m not a search engine. You just never know what a robot is going to find exciting!

I think the whole duplicate content thing is more of a scare tactic, and peole trying to create a market than anything.

Every time a new “dupe content” thing comes out, my readers and coaching clients blow up my phone, blog, and email about it. Everyone is so scared of it.

I’ve tested and tested and will always test the duplicate content theory, but this is what I have found…

If you have a site that isn’t a template site that everyone and there brother is using, and your content is about 75-80% unique, you’re good to go.

If dupe content was an issue, the blog memes, the link baiting and all the other stuff we do as bloggers would have us all down in the bottom 1 million of the search results.

Just my thoughts…

Liz

That’s how I’m feeling about the issue. That DupeCure thing, once you turn it on, automatically blocks category pages, etc. where some of the richest keyword density is.

I have pages like tag results pages that rank in the engines over individual posts in those results because of the density (what other reason would it be?)

So I turned it back off. Wanted to see what it did and I dont like any plugin that just takes over something this serious without easily being able to choose what it blocks indexing on.

You can change things but you have to get into the code. This plugin looks mroe and more like link bait “I have a plugin” kind of thing rather than something created from an authority position on what to do with this issue.

So, before you can fix the problem of Google indexing our posts from tag pages, category pages, and the such, don’t you first have to figure out what Google considers duplicate content?

I have over 100 content sites. I have tested the heck out of this duplicate content stuff, and the only time I have seen my SE rankings drop is when I used a cookie cutter site…

So before we fix a problem, don’t we have to see what the problem is?

And… What could these new “dupe cures” do in terms of effecting our blogs in a negative way?

Liz

I find Google very fickle. One site I got out of supplemental 1 week after getting into 3 of the premium paid-for directories, whilst another site is still largely supplemental despite spending several hundred $$ on directories including Yahoo.

One thing you may want to consider is checking for broken links, for instance this page not longer exists:

“http://www.jackhumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport/copywriting-tips/”

On the only wordpress blog I own I have the All in One SEO plugin which allows you to block archives.

April