Does WordPress tag page lead to duplicate content?

Question

Let's say I am having a tag page at WordPress like http://www.mysite.com/tag/tag_name/ having 2 blog posts A & B and a category page like http://www.mysite.com/category/category_name/ having blog posts B & C. The content of post B I'll be shown on both pages and the permanent link of post B too. Can this example be a case of duplicate content as the full post B is being shown in various pages along with other posts which are different in each page?

Those pages are already are nofollow except permalink of the blog posts but still they content is being duplicated all over. I wonder if it would have impact on my SEO?

Answer 1

Yes, this could be treated as duplicate content since you would have the exact same content under two different URLs.

This is common if you are slow to post new content because the category/tag archive pages would not be updating frequently. One solution to this is to set WordPress to just show the excerpts on the archive pages and be sure to set a custom excerpt so that the content will be different from the archive page to the post page.

If the archive pages are nofollowed then none of this really matters. You could also block them from indexing via robots.txt and/or the noindex meta tag.

Answer 2

Google is extremely understand of how WordPress works and will not penalize you for your tags and category pages.

I personally hate these pages myself so I disallow them in the robots.txt and if you are worried about them, you should do the same.

Just add these to your robots.txt:

disallow /tag/
disallow /category/

Answer 3

I understand this is an old post but I think my insight will be useful to someone out there. The issue about wordpress tag comes down to how Google sees it in the search console. If you have included your tag sitemap xml page, then Google will see multiple tag pages with the same contents as duplicate page contents. But if you have to use multiple tags on one post, do not submit the tag and category sitemap xml page to Google. Only submit the post and page sitemap xml page. Finally, count the number of pages you have on your website and make sure Google is showing the same count on the search console.

Answer 4

My answer to Automatically generate and cut off the blog post preview texts from the full post text? Yes, no? applies to this question as well:

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.

I recommend truncating posts on the tag pages. 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.