Avoiding Duplicate Content in Wordpress

[brnm98105]

Hi Guys an Gals,

Ive searched everywhere throughout here and seems to be a common thread but before I implement I want to make sure and get a few seperate opinions on my specific dilema .

My blog looks like this http://www.example.com/blog/2009/06/name-of-my-post.html

I want to avoid duplicate content and not sure how. Ive seen some people say robots.txt and others say certain plugins. What i want to do is have my archives and categories not indexed. It seems that those would be the 2 to avoid being indexed so I'm not penalized for duplicate content.

Several of my posts have multiple categories. Should I just delete the categories and avoid using them for any post. My blog does not need them. should I just delete the categories on my template in general. Will this avoid them form being followed. As I said i never use them and really dont need my users to see them.

Whats the best way to avoid duplicate content on wordpress? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[edited by: tedster at 1:04 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

Have you seen the thread that's in our Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com]?

WordPress And Google: Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues [webmasterworld.com]

It's a few year old, now, but it does cover the main issues. Also, during the intervening time, Google did get better with not making duplicate trouble for common applications like Wordpress.

[edited by: tedster at 3:11 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2009]

[youfoundjake]

Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /archive/

I primarily do mine through robots.txt and make sure that I have an .htaccess rule set up to rewrite non-www to www, and in Google's webmaster console, set the preferred domain of www.example.com to crawl.
hope that helps..