Same blog post in several categories - Good or Bad idea? (dupe content)

[Jessica]

Guys, whta do you think about make a Blog post and then filing it under 2 or 3 categories?

Won't Google frown on it as a dupe content?

Because it's going to be exactly the same post on 2 or 3 different URLs.

[Quadrille]

It's the curse of the Blog.

Avoid if possible. Most blogs already have multiple URLs for each post, best not to spread things too wide.

[koan]

When I used category names in my URL, wordpress only used the first choice, even when the article was displayed in the other category, so I didn't have duplicate URLs. However, recently (as my site is still young) I just decided it would be wiser to remove the category name from the URLs in case I do some reorganizing in the future. Gonna be a bumpy few weeks but I think I made the right choice for the long term.

[Jessica]

I'm not talking about same URLs

I'm taking about same posts content.

There can be 2 different URLs that have exactly the same content (text)

[Quadrille]

If there's 3 urls, divide the page rank by two; if there's four, by three (or thereabouts).

The basic setup is sloppy coding by the blog folk (plus the inherent weakness of most database content systems).

But you should do nothing to add to your woes.

Mind you, with most blogs, it's only the index page that gets a look in, so the difference may not be significant.

[edited by: Quadrille at 11:58 am (utc) on Feb. 15, 2008]