Duplicate content is not necessarily the worst thing that could happen to your blog. However, Google’s ongoing mission to offer search results that are the freshest most relevant don’t really like duplicate content. In fact, Google punishes sites with high amounts of duplicate content by giving you lower search rankings or rewards you with a slightly lower page rank. Google’s supplemental index is the category they use to archive the amount of duplicate content that is on your site or can be found on other sites. So what exactly constitutes duplicate content? Lets see what Google has to say.

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.

Managing duplicate content across other domains is difficult and we have little control over. However, managing the amount of duplicate content on your site is well within your reach. If you are a blogger using Wordpress, then there are several problems that need to be dealt with out of the box.

As a general rule. We want to only be able to access our posts from one source on our blog. This ensures that duplicate content will be kept to a minimum. You should make sure that your posts are not shown in full in your category and archive sections.

The other thing that you can do would be to prevent Google bots from following certain links and indexing them. This is easy using some Wordpress plugins.

Home Page Excerpts for SEO
This plugin allows you to modify your homepage to show full posts only on the number you choose. So if your homepage displays 4 posts, then anything after those posts will display as excerpts. Having a post indexed can take some time. So by the time that post is indexed, it will only show as an excerpt and not seen as having duplicate content.

Robots Meta by Joost De Valk
This plugin allows you to easily add meta robots tags into your blog. It also can be configured to prevent robots from indexing certain aspects of your blog. For instance: preventing indexing of subpages to your homepage, prevent indexing of RSS feeds, prevent indexing of your login information, disable author and date-based archives. This is definitely a handy tool.