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I run a blog with over 1000 posts that are only separated by tags, so each post can have multiple of those.

As it is mostly short news, videos and galleries, the description consists of 3-5 lines of text. It's so short that I don't write a separate description for the preview text, meaning that the text on the post page is the same as the one on the listing pages.

Not only is that creating a lot of text on the first page, but also some sort duplicate content. This is why I came up with an idea to simply cut off the text automatically when it's being displayed on the listing pages.

For example:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. 
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 
1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it 
to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, 
but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remainin

would become something like:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. 
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s ...

It would be cut at approximately 160 characters, similarly to the description meta tag. Do you think this is safe or even advisable to do or will it bother Google?

I don't want to write separate descriptions for such short texts, because it will just look like keyword stuffing up and down the page.

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2

Google will never penalize blogs that have duplicated content on permalinks, tag pages, and home pages because full posts are show in each place. Google will choose one one of those places to index, and that will generally be the permalink page.

Google can't penalize blogs for duplicate content here because there are so many sites with CMS systems that work this way out of the box. The sites aren't doing anything malicious. They have tons of good content that Google would like to index. The software just has bad SEO defaults. Google will have had to write special cases to deal with these CMS systems when crawling and indexing the sites.

That being said, I think your idea of truncating posts on the tag pages is a good idea. I tend to use the ----more---- feature in Wordpress to divide my blog posts up so that only a piece of the post gets displayed on tag and home pages.

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6
  • Do you have an official source on what you say in two first paragraphs?
    – Zistoloen
    Mar 8 '13 at 12:17
  • Even the Stack Exchange Blog doesn't limit the content of their posts on the tag pages. I see tons of blogs set up this way that rank fine. Wordpress is such a common platform that Google must have some special code to deal with its quirks. I know they have written special code for forum software because they often display results from those sites differently in the SERPs.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Mar 8 '13 at 12:24
  • I agree with you but do you have an official source (from Google for example)?
    – Zistoloen
    Mar 8 '13 at 12:27
  • There are many things in SEO that for which I would like Google to give me an official word. Sadly, this is another case in which Google has stayed silent.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Mar 8 '13 at 12:29
  • Too bad, I was interested by an official source on this point.
    – Zistoloen
    Mar 8 '13 at 13:00
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Indeed, cut off the blog post preview texts is good in order to bypass duplicate content issues. It's a good pratice. 160 characters seems to me good.

So yes for me.

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