Duplicate content is by far the worst problem an out of the box installation of Wordpress comes with. When you publish a new article, renders it in at least six different locations:

• The article’s Single page (the Permalink of the post, i.e. the URL where your visitors can read the full article)
• The category page (if you haven’t used the <!—more—> tag, the full article will be displayed again)
• The Monthly/Yearly archive pages (similarly to the above, either the excerpt or the full article will be shown once again)
• The front page
• The tags pages (one time for each tag; if an article has five tags, there will be five different URL’s displaying the very same content)
• The RSS feed (even though it’s not user-friendly and human readable, the XML feed does show duplicate content)
• … and probably more, depending on the plugins you have installed.

Even though Google algorithms somewhat know about the issue and won’t penalize Wordpress blogs with this kind of duplicate content, they will still index each and every page. You might end up having, let’s say, your Tags page rank higher than the article for your chosen keywords. To deal with the duplicate content issue, you will need to either do a bit of hacking of the Wordpress code or install some plugin(s) that will do the dirty work for you. In particular, you will need to

• Create unique titles for each page;
• Add unique descriptions to each URL;
• Block the indexing of the various instances of an article;
• Clearly define in robots.txt the locations Google and the other crawlers are allowed to look at.

AllinOneSEO is a truly great plugin to do on-page SEO for your Wordpress blog. It gives you control over each structural element that might affect the SEO-wise performance of your site. Let’s have a look at what it can do. After installing and activating the plugin, go to Settings –> All In One SEO.

First fields are quite self-explanatory and I won’t go into much detail. Enter the page title, description and META keywords.

Tick the Rewrite Titles box (if it’s not enabled by default) if you want AiOSEO to automagically rewrite the titles of each of the pages below. Leave it unchecked if you want do modify the titles manually. While I cannot recommend an optimal structure for the titles, a common practice is The title of the post | The name of the blog. This scheme is filled in by default, provides a good user experience and search engines seem to like this structure. You shouldn’t worry about the name of the blog appearing on each page. I will not raise any duplicate content flags, provided the name is a common sense phrase and not an entire sentence. In other words, you shouldn’t have titles like Dodge Viper | The blog of John Smith, owner of John Smith’s Used Car Store and BMW Z3 | The blog of John Smith, owner of John Smith’s Used Car Store.

Next, you should disable the indexing of unnecessary pages. Categories, Archives and Tag Archives shouldn’t be crawled, since they are just listing the same content as other areas of the site.

Google is known to love sites that tell the spiders move faster. By telling the crawlers what they are not allowed to index, you are helping the search engine index your site faster.

Last, but not least, you will want to disable indexing of the RSS feed, the search page and the Login form. Enter all these, as relative URL’s, in the Exclude Pages form:

Follow these easy steps and you will find that the All in One SEO plugin is a one-stop solution for all your on-page Wordpress SEO needs.