Duplicate Content Help Needed

  • I have a couple of old sites which used wordpress as a CMS. They were set up when i was very new to wordpress, so I mistakenly created posts instead of pages. To keep a static homepage I set wordpress to display 1 post per page, and changed dates on any new posts so that they were always older than the one i wanted to display as the homepage.

    Obviously I now know I should have created pages and used the static homepage function built into wordpress (hindsight is a wonderful thing)

    However, what should I do about it now? My main concern is that as the homepage is also a post, there is a duplicate content issue – i.e blogname.com has the same content as blogname.com/firstblogpost

    Before making any changes i want to make sure i get it right this time. I have thought about using one of the options listed below, but am not sure how this will affect the site.

      Copy the post displayed as the homepage into a new page, set this as the static homepage, and then delete the post?
      Use phpmyadmin to change the post_type of the homepage post into a page, and then select this as static homepage.
      Use a plugin, such as p2pconverter to change the homepage post into a page, and set this as the static homepage?

    I would appreciate your opinions and advice on how i can rectify this problem. The sites rank well for some good keywords so I would be looking for the method which is going to have a minimal impact on SERPs, etc.

    Also, with the methods listed above, or any better methods suggested, will I need to do anything else to tie up the loose ends – i.e 301 redirects?

    Many Thanks in Advance

    Nick

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  • Look into the new canonical tag to see if that helps.

    Thread Starter utopia81

    (@utopia81)

    I did a bit of reading on that yesterday, and downloaded the plugin. But I couldn’t find much information abou the plugin yet so not exactly sure how it works. Or whether it is the right solution to my problem?

    It probably won’t solve your issues all on its own, it would be more useful for pointing search engines to the correct URLs for each post, so that you don’t get penalised for duplicate content.

    Could you keep displaying 1 post per page, keep your homepage post but just set it as a sticky?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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