How to resolve duplicate content issues?

Hey folks,

I hope this is the right place to post. I've tried some searches but didn't really find much that was recent.

I was checking rankings and indexing for one of my sites and when doing some manual checks in google by entering site:website.com to see how many pages were indexed, I found that I had more than expected - about 20 more.

I see several items that are listed twice. They have different url structures for example:
note: my permalinks are set-up as:
website/category/postname

I find some of the duplicate posts to be set-up as follows
website/postname
website/category/postname

A couple of things to note:
1. My categories are currently set to index - should I set them to no-index to see if this fixes the problem?
2. I recently siloed the site and changed my permalink structure from website/postname to website/category/postname. Keyword terms received a significant improvement to overall ranking. However, I am wondering if this somehow cause a duplicate content issue in some cases.

If you have any ideas about how to kill duplicate content like this, I am all ears =)

Yes, set the categories to no-index unless you can set up for each category and write an introduction to each category. That will make the structure unique enough to be index without penalization from G for dup content. You might have to write the intros into the code for each category.

About finding dup content in post form. You can look for a plugin for this or get on SEOClerks and hire a coder to write it for you, it's a simple command that can be written in under 15 minutes.

IAlwaysWin said:

Yes, set the categories to no-index unless you can set up for each category and write an introduction to each category. That will make the structure unique enough to be index without penalization from G for dup content. You might have to write the intros into the code for each category.

About finding dup content in post form. You can look for a plugin for this or get on SEOClerks and hire a coder to write it for you, it's a simple command that can be written in under 15 minutes.

Click to expand...

Great tip - I appreciate the response. I am going to noindex the categories and for the posts, I am thinking about a 301 or rel=conical to point to the correct version. Hopefully this shakes out.