Administrator
From an seo point of view, Google doesn't seem to like wordpress child pages and considers them to be more duplicate content that has a negative effect on rankings.
Only if you have the same content on two pages. There is no duplicate content penalty for subpages. That SEO info is incorrect.
Member
Only if you have the same content on two pages. There is no duplicate content penalty for subpages. That SEO info is incorrect.
@Ipstenu, that's cool, you with your opinion, I'll stick with mine.
I may have worded my statement a little wrong, more like a general duplicate filter. This consists of duplicate URLs, Page Titles and meta description. If Google didn't care about these 3 parameters being duplicated on a website, they wouldn't go to all the trouble of informing us of these site issues in webmaster tools.
I'm constantly seeing these dupe issues with my article directory in webmaster tools. Caused by authors submitting articles with the same title, thus also creating a dupe url when using the /%postname%/ permalink structure. Only difference being the digit added to the end of the url to define its uniqueness from the previous post url with the same title. So even though the article contents are different, Google still give warnings. I also get them with post sub pages.
There is no such thing as duplicate content penalty since your site and pages are not penalized in any way, simply just filtered out the results, effecting both versions of the dupe content.
You are probably well aware that Google uses site wide relevance factors when deciding what content it chooses to rank from a site for certain keywords. This is where post sub-pages can have another negative effect on SEO. E.g. Lets say you have a big post on your site with 5 sub-pages. Since Google will only rank one of those pages in the serps for your target keyphrase, it may determine that sub-page 3 to be algorithmically more relevant than the primary post for the keyphrase, thus ranking sub-page 3 and filtering the primary post out. This results in lower CTR in the serps because of sub-page Title and url addons. E.g. Title: Awesome Post - Page 3 Url: domain.com/awesome-post/page/3/
Google have recently started to combat this issue by announcing the use of rel=”next” and rel=”prev” meta tags that webmasters can use to help Google determine what pages it should consider most relevant. Read more about it here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Administrator
Ah, indeed you're right, that is NOT the dread 'duplicate content' issue, but something else entirely.
And yes, if you name all your pages similarly, Google will drop them a little not because of duplication, but because of lack of uniqueness. I know that sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but so is Google.
So yes, if the CONTENT of page 3 is better, and page 3 gets more incoming links, yes, it will rank higher than page 1. Hiding the pages won't help, unless you want to manually toss in a 'noindex' to the pagination links, and perhaps force /page/# to be in your robots.txt
By the way, the /page/# is not the same as a subpage, furthering my confusion in what you meant :)
Pagination is a built in feature that, used by most people for category/tag/date listings of posts, rather than for individual pages, and use the /page/# format.
Subpages, on the other hand, are when you MANUALLY create a page /about/ and then a subpage /me/ to force the URL /about/me/
Similar, but different.
Member
That would be perfect and make things much easier.
Member
Some degree of duplicate content is fine regardless, so it just depends on degrees.
Member
WordPress 3.3 is almost done, maybe this is the time to considerate this ideia. Go enjoy and share. :-D
More information about WordPress development cycle. http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/
Member
There has been a plugin for this feature but it was not updated for WP3.0 and it did not worked for me when I tested it few months ago!
I think it it is a good idea to have it as standard in such way that there is a "+" or a button to expand the child pages and so on.
Member
is this something can is possible through a plugin? has a plugin like this been made?
Member
Sure ;)
Take a look at the Admin Collapse Subpages plugin (which seems to be updated here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/admin-collapse-subpages/screenshots/ ).
However, I haven't tested it lately but I think this feature should be a standard feature in WP.
Member
A stronger page admin management interface would certainly help WP progress as an enterprise level solution.
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