Fix duplicate content issues in WordPress
Duplicate content is, for example, an article or category that exists twice on your website. Duplicate content is seen as something negative by Google. It can cause your hard work on a page or article to be nullified by being penalized. And thus not appearing in Google's search results, or only appearing far down. Here's how to quickly fix the most common WordPress hosting issues!
WordPress makes it easy to create a website for anyone. You can always find a solution quickly thanks to its simple interface and myriad resources. And it's easy to change the layout with a theme. Or add functionality with a plugin. However, some small mistakes can cause your website to lose its ranking in search engines. And lose traffic as a result. With these steps, you can make sure your WordPress website doesn't suffer.
Tags within WordPress
Tags are meant to make it easy for visitors to find related articles and move between topics. Tags used to be considered a powerful tool for ranking, but nowadays it's just a detriment when trying to rank content. Our advice is to ditch this completely on your website and don't add tags for articles. Combining content and scrolling through topics is much better done using categories. And this is where it belongs.
Using tags creates separate pages with actually the same category, this often leads to conflicts and the duplicate content penalty. So it is advisable not to include this in your website.
Writing similar content
Often websites like a food blog have many different pages with roughly the same idea. For example, there are 101 recipes for the same recipe. Make sure to change the URLs of these different recipes to unique URLs or put them in a separate category. This way, it's clear to Google that they are similar content. But no duplicate content. There are also clear differences in the meta description. And for example, the different types of vegetables or the steps already briefly described.
With similar content on recipe websites, you also don't want to add unnecessary content at the beginning of the article. It's important to give the user a recipe quickly or the user experience will suffer. This is also an important Google ranking factor. So always try to keep this relevant to the article and not just add content to make it different. Explain how a recipe is different, what other ingredients are used and make a comparison with another recipe. This way you keep the content unique.
Create unique URLs
Creating unique URLs that are also readable remains a crucial part of becoming visible to search engines. This has already been covered in previous blog posts about creating a readable URL in WordPress. But let's emphasize it again. A good title, and therefore a good URL, is very important. And did you know that you can change the URL slug within WordPress without losing your title?
The URL slug is important for search engines to determine what the website page is about, and they also pay attention to whether it's too long or too short. It is often better to keep the URL slug short and the title itself under 60 characters. This will not be truncated when displayed within the Google search network.
Further checking of problems within the Google Search Console
Every now and then, it is also advisable to check your website's display within Google Search Console. Are your current articles getting indexed, are they suitable for mobile devices and is there duplicate content? You can quickly see these questions in the Google Search Console reports. We recommend making Search Console active for every website. This way, you can get a glimpse of how a search engine like Google sees and renders your website. You can see what terms you are ranking for, suggestions for other terms to write articles about, and explained technique and readability.
With a simple TXT entry in the DNS records, the owner of the website is determined and is therefore easy to set up when hosting with MijnHostingPartner.nl directly from the customer panel. Thanks to our global DNS solution, it is also quickly visible in Google Search Console. And this can be processed to show you the results.
If you still want to read the full article that inspired this post, you can take a look at the following link:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-seo/common-duplicate-content-issues/
