Post tags could be viewed as duplicate content?

binaryking

binaryking

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Hello guys,

So in every post, I have about 10 tags or so and every tags have been indexed in google, I'm actually getting traffic from my tags. I'm afraid that it could be seen as duplicate content by google bot. I've just added noindex to the /tag/ in my robots.txt.

What should I do now?

Thanks.
 
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I have been using tags for years, sometimes 20+ tags per article and I have never seen any penalty! :)
 
0scan0 said:
I have been using tags for years, sometimes 20+ tags per article and I have never seen any penalty! :)
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Thanks, this's debatable since I've seen site with lot of tags rank well compared to other sites.

But just whether google loves the site way more than.. having lot of index but duplicate content or not..?
 
Well...you have to think that google doesnt read design, it reads the content on the site. So if you have mass tags, it will read it like text. Matt Cutts had mentioned this in a video a while ago.
 
makemecash said:
Well...you have to think that google doesnt read design, it reads the content on the site. So if you have mass tags, it will read it like text. Matt Cutts had mentioned this in a video a while ago.
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Can you suggest what should I do?
 
I now have it blocked in robots.txt...

Seem like a lot of different opinions on this matter.
 
gullsinn said:
No Duplicate issue don't worry for that.
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I have to disagree. Text is text. The spiders don't crawl your site and then say "oh wait! that's just a tag cloud, let's pass it."
No, it's treated just like any other text on the site.
 
makemecash said:
I have to disagree. Text is text. The spiders don't crawl your site and then say "oh wait! that's just a tag cloud, let's pass it."
No, it's treated just like any other text on the site.
Click to expand...

So, we shouldn't use tag on our post? Since we shouldn't index it and no point to pass link juice to the link tag?
 
My site has been penalised. I noticed in webmaster tools that I had 873 duplicate title tags so no one is going to tell me that Google ignore it! I use Wordpress SEO by Yoast and I was on the wordpress forum for his plugin and everyone is in agreement that tags will be considered dupe content. I noindex all of them.
There is also a great post on seomoz which states the same.
 
0scan0 said:
I have been using tags for years, sometimes 20+ tags per article and I have never seen any penalty! :)
Click to expand...

20+ tags per article and you've never gotten a penalty? Interesting.

I post duplicate content on my site and blast it with 100,000 Xrumer blasts and I also have never seen a penalty. </sarcasm>
 
Tags are very useful because Google can get relevant keywords for the post and find similar ones thanks to them. I would not block them, that's just nonsense. WordPress is used by millions of bloggers - if using tags would be harmful all of them would have been already penalized.

BTW I created a plugin that can add tags to posts automatically - it is called Automatic Post Tagger. :)
 
Last edited:
no, i don't think they will be viewed as duplicated content, but i also don't think using them will bring you any advantage right now. It's a method that used to work 3-5 years ago and it's useless now
 
ja1myn said:
20+ tags per article and you've never gotten a penalty? Interesting.

I post duplicate content on my site and blast it with 100,000 Xrumer blasts and I also have never seen a penalty. </sarcasm>
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Will it depends on how much text the article has, If it has 1000 words there's nothing strange in posting 20 tags because they are relevant to the text. Always use tags of words that you can find in the article, don't just go to GKT and find as many keywords as you can and post them if the keywords isn't mentioned in the text somewhere. :)
 
There are differing opinions on this, but the prevailing message I seem to get is that a small number of tags on a post won't attract too much negative attention. Stuffing tags with keywords is dangerous because the spiders do read them as text. Between five and ten tags and you'll be fine, but more than that and you run the risk of a penalty. Also, blocking the tags in robots.txt will only work for tags going forward - they'll still be able to see the ones that have gone before.
 
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