A question was posted by Gary Green how they would be creating problems for themselves by upgrading their version of wordpress.
This duplicate content isn’t anything so sinister as people stealing their content. It is far worse, the duplicate content is created by wordpress itself!
The problem? By default an option is turned on which creates multiple copies of their content on different pages
Try doing the search that they used in google: inurl:comment-page-1 -inurl:html Over a Million and a half duplicate entries are indexed already.
Try doing the search again but for your own website! site:salmonbones.co.uk inurl:comment-page-1 (replace salmonbones.co.uk with your domain name)
What does this mean? Each page listed twice is dragging the overall search engine rankings of both pages down. Possibly even the whole website.
Don’t be a lazy wordpress blog owner, make sure you aren’t indexing more then one copy of your articles! The reason for these duplicates? The owners most likely upgraded to wordpress 2.7 – a good thing, but If you have a WordPress theme that is not using the new comment system and you did not change any settings you will be affected.
Until there is a proper solution released by the wordpress team, I recommend you to turn off the comment setting that unfortunately has been put on by default. (You can find this under Settings –> Discussion)
If you have that turned off those duplicated URLs will 301 redirect back to the normal URLs.
Adding meta-robots tags noindex on these pages or blocking them in the robots.txt is not a sufficient good solution in my opinion.
What will happen if you upgrade but allow your content to be duplicated? Possibly nothing, but if search terms you previously ranked high for start dropping, then you can be sure this is in part to blame.
If you have Google Webmaster account, check out the diagnostic Content analysis tools. There is high potential that your blog will generate duplicate content (if the comment paging feature is enabled).
Why duplicate content is bad for your blog?
• Having multiple search crawler indexing the same content on your website (over and over) is an absolute bandwidth waster.
• Bad PR. This are quite debatable to the point of myth, some search engine penalize website for duplicate content but according to Google webmaster team “If the duplicate content is not done to game (deceive) the search results there is no penalty”. Just pretend all major search engine service does have penalty rules for duplicate content issues. From my past experiences there is no telling or earlier notice “they’ll just drop you, so can you spent sometimes to figure out the why later” .
• Bad SERPS, rationally the main articles that you post should have more weight than the rest of the comment page or sub page, you don’t want to see your archives or comment page on Search Engine results while your main articles is no where to be found.
Grab free experiences in the sphere of web traffic – your personal knowledge base.
