Duplicate Content in Wordpress

Google reading 2 URLs

[alika]

GWT is showing duplicate title tags for a single post:

/2009/06/11/title-of-the-post/
/?p=8428

The blog is using All in One SEO plugin, with the Canonical URLs checked. But this problem remains and have been persistent

They have also configured Google Webmaster Tool in its Parameter Handling section to ignore the parameter p

My questions:

1. Is there a better plugin that can remove this duplicate content problem?

2. Any other way to remove this problem (.htaccess or others?)

Thanks

[g1smd]

A simple redirect using a RewriteRule can fix it, but you need to decide whether you want to redirect just this one exact URL, or a bunch of URLs that follow a similar pattern. If the latter, you need a very exact definition of that "pattern" in order to get the correct code installed in your .htaccess file. The redirect(s) goes ahead of any other WP code in the .htaccess file.

[alika]

Thanks a lot. But pardon my ignorance as I am not a techie.

How will that rewrite rule look like? What's the code I need to ask them to put on the site? Thanks

[ergophobe]

First we would need to know what the duplicate URLs look like. There could be several reasons

- that page could be accessible by two URLs

- that page was at the top of the "current" list when the site was crawled and it was effectively both its own page and the category page.


So first find out where the dupe titles are coming from, then find out if other pages could have the same problem. Then we can look to finding a solution.

[alika]

Thanks ergophobe

The site is accessible with the two URLs. This is a blog, and using a subdomain of the main site.

One problem is that the main site's search results listing the blog posts are all using the

?p=8428

URL, and not the designated permalink structure /2009/06/11/title-of-the-post/

So that's one problem we're working to address internally.

GWT is listing about 9,000+ pages with this dupe problem

[ergophobe]

well... there's your answer. You need to do two things

1. quit publishing those URLs anywhere on your site

2. send a 301 for all such URLs to the permalink. I believe that nowdays Wordpress should be doing this by default if permalinks are set up right.

So really #1 is your main problem.

One thing, can you explain what you mean by "accessible"? Does that URL end up as the final URL in the address bar, or do you end up with the permalink? And what headers is it sending? Is it currently sending a 301 of ?p=8428

[alika]

The /?p=8428 is ending up as the final URL in the address bar. It does not redirect to the permalink currently set up /2009/06/11/title-of-the-post/

[g1smd]

Use the "Live HTTP Headers" extension for Firefox to deduce what HTTP status code is returned for that URL. That's important too.