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Duplicate content with tagging and categories
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Hello,
Moz is showing that a site has duplicate content - which appears to be because of tags and categories. It is a relatively new site, with only a few blog publications so far. This means that the same articles are displayed under a number of different tags and categories...
Is this something I should worry about, or just wait until I have more content? The 'tag' and 'category' pages are not really pages I would expect or aim for anyone to find in google results anyway.
Would be glad to here any advice / opinions on this
Thanks!
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Thanks, great answer - will update the template I think
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Agreed. Radi, if you'd like to eliminate the issue from your Moz report, you can noindex, follow those category pages.
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With Bigcommerce, I had this issue as well, and the way Bigcommerce dumps blog tags doesn't allow for any editing to be done for just those pages. So I had to dump my use of blog tags in general, was thinking of creating the tags myself for each blog entry, but haven't gotten around to it, just wanted to remove the tags to avoid the dup content.
I'm sure others may have this issue but also believe most CMSs allow for more customization of this type of section.
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Matt Cutts answered a very similar question some time back in this video response.
In short, it's not a problem having these date/category pages, provided you've got them formatted correctly. Basically, just make sure that on each of these pages, you're only showing the heading and a small snippet; usually a paragraph or two and maybe an accompanying image.
If you're doing this, search engines have no issue understanding that it's essentially an aggregation page rather than duplicate content. If you're unlucky enough to be working with a CMS that just dumps then entire posts onto each category/tag page then you're definitely playing with fire!
If you're using Wordpress, often the simplest way to go about doing this is using the "more" tag which you'll find at the top of the text area when writing a post. Clicking that button will add into the HTML which cuts the snippet off at that point and provides a "read more" link to the full article. Here is a link to more info about it, note that current versions of wordpress do look different to these screenshots; you're looking for a button that just says "more", rather than the icon they use here.
The best way to deal with it is to update your template to automatically cut it off at a certain length for you, it just depends on whether you have access to a dev to make this change.
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