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Blog Support – Wordpress and Google Supplemental Index Fix

Admin – Thu Jul 05, 2007 12:45 pm
Post subject: – Wordpress and Google Supplemental Index Fix

Wordpress and Google Supplemental Index Fix

Recently I was made aware of a problem with duplicate content using the popular Blogging CMS WordPress. As it turns out WordPress is not so Search Engine Friendly!

Rose was going through her search engine results in Google.com when she noticed something very weird. The search results returned by Google was marked with "Supplemental Results", for many of her pages.

Uh Oh Google Hell!

For users who don't know or understand what 'Supplemental Results,' is here is the definition from Google's Webmaster support page.

Google's official definition from their webmaster page:

Quote:

Supplemental sites are part of Google's auxiliary index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there's no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its Pagerank.

In other words it's been marked as 'Supplemental Results' for duplicate content.

Now the problem is WordPress uses categories and the date function..

Meaning any number of post are viewable or accessible in more then one method using WordPress, and WordPress is creating duplicate content which is penalized by Google which in return can affect your traffic and Google Pagerank!

Example:

http://www.yourblog.com/2007/07/05/

And

http://www.yourblog.com/2007/07/05/your-post-subject/

Therefore Google see this as duplicate content, which is a big no-no!

How to Fix Duplicate Content in WordPress

The best method to use is Meta noindex,nofollow tags on specific pages, like archives, categories etc..

This is the fix I applied to Rose's blog

Open up your themes header.php file, it can be found in

/public_html/wp-content/themes/Your-Theme

Next add the following after the last Meta tags

Code:

<?php
if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page()){
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index,follow\" />\n";
} else {
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex,nofollow\" />\n";
}
?>

Now regular pages can be indexed and single pages but pages that are referenced by date like shown above will be ignored by Google due to the rule we have put in place for Googlebot exclusion noindex, nofollow!

Once the above fix is in place, be sure to ping your blog and resubmit you’re Google Sitemap and wait for Google to update their index pages and drop the 'Supplemental Results'.

If you have any questions or need help, please feel free to reply in the forums!

Shawn DesRochers Wink

If you think this post is helpful, please stumble or digg it. Thanks! Admin – Tue Jul 10, 2007 4:20 pm
Post subject: – Re: Wordpress and Google Supplemental Index Fix

Google And Supplemental Results

In the battle of 'supplemental results,' I have now included the following on Roses blog. It seems Google is marking her pages as 'supplemental results', but not the normal pages the ones listed in categories..

Example: http://www.yourblog.com/category/page/1 or http://www.yourblog.com/category/page/2 etc...

To fix this I suggest using the robots.txt file and adding the following!

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: */feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: */page/$

The above code will disallow Google from parsing individual post feeds, trackbacks and pages..etc...

Shawn DesRochers