How do I properly deal with duplicate content when showing the latest content from my blog on a main page?

Question

If my website has multiple blogposts:

• /blog/first-post.html
• /blog/second-post.html
• /blog/third-post.html

... and I want only the latest post to be fully shown on /blog/ What is the best way to handle this SEO friendly?

Should I add a canonical relation fromt /blog to /blog/latest-post.html?

Should I redirect traffic from /blog/ to /blog/latest-post.html? And if so with what redirect code: 302?

Should I not use /blog altogether and have my main menu button "Blog" directly go to /blog/latest-post.html?

Answer 1

Personally I wouldn't worry too much about this, it's a fairly typical setup for a blog.

What "duplicate content" comes down to in this context is what happens when someone searches for a phrase that appears in your latest blog post. For such a search, the search engine has to decide whether to link to /blog/ or /blog/latest-post.html in the results. (In most cases it wouldn't list both.) If you don't particularly mind (and why would you?), just let the search engine do its thing. You won't suffer in any way because of this. Over time, the latest post will move off your main blog page and all the search traffic will end up on the individual blog post page.

If this really does bother and you wish to influence the decision, the best way would be to use the 'priority' field in your site's XML sitemap. Give a higher priority to either the main blog page or all the individual blog pages, whichever one you'd prefer to appear. The search engine will then take this into consideration when deciding which page to link to.

I wouldn't recommend redirecting traffic since this just makes it unnecessarily difficult for someone to link to your blog (they'd end up linking to whatever post was the current one at the time).

I also wouldn't recommend using a canonical URL since the two URLs don't relate to the same resource (especially if your blog page has more than one post on it). This would also make it trickier for someone to find your blog via. a search engine (as if they searched for "Luuk Barten blog", the search engine will end up linking to whatever was the most recent post at the time your site was last indexed).

Answer 2

The safest thing to do in this situation is use the The ‘read more’ quick tag.

This is a tag used on posts so that only a snippet of the post appears on the blog start page and not the entire article. There is a link under the snippet, usually 'read more', that links to the blog post and the entire article.

Instructions on using the ‘read more’ tag can be found here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/

Here is video from Matt Cutts explaining about using snippets on posts on pages and not the entire articles.