Sidebar – Duplicate Content

  • kellyapproved

    (@kellyapproved)


    14 years, 6 months ago

    On my sidebar, I had my categories and archives listed by month. My site suffered in the search engines because of duplicate content penalties.

    Since removing this, my site is doing much better and traffic has increased. However, so has the bounce rate on the side because the sidebar has little content.

    How can I add categories and/or archives to the sidebar without the search engines seeing it? Is there a way to add it using a javascript or something?

    Also, what other content could I add for users that search engines can’t see?

    Thank you

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • esmi

    (@esmi)

    14 years, 6 months ago

    My site suffered in the search engines because of duplicate content penalties.

    How do you know? And what makes you think it was your sidebar links that were the problem?

    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

    shane-g

    (@shane-g)

    14 years, 6 months ago

    Hi,

    Check with this plugin:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/no-duplicate-content/

    Thanks,

    Shane G.

    Thread Starter kellyapproved

    (@kellyapproved)

    14 years, 6 months ago

    @esmi It would have to be the sidebar. When I did a search for site:domain name in google, it brought up about 3000 pages, which is roughly the number of blog posts I have on the site.

    When you go through the listings, it showed about 750-800 only. There would then be a message saying that the rest of the results were to similar to the 800 already shown.

    Since receiving this, the only change made was to take everything out of the sidebar except for a few banner ads and a feed icon and the number of listings in Google are increasing.

    esmi

    (@esmi)

    14 years, 6 months ago

    When you go through the listings, it showed about 750-800 only. There would then be a message saying that the rest of the results were to similar to the 800 already shown.

    Were the other 800 similar to the 750-800 displayed? If so, that’s not a duplicate penalty. That’s just Google being sensible and not listing identical pages because they’ve been indexed with differing urls.

    Thread Starter kellyapproved

    (@kellyapproved)

    14 years, 6 months ago

    @esmi – The posts were all original content but short posts so the effect of lots of text in the sidebar had more of an effect on the overall page.

    Reducing the sidebar allowed the posts to rank. That’s why I’m looking for a better alternative to add some more content to the sidebar without triggering these penalties.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘Sidebar – Duplicate Content’ is closed to new replies.