Google published a post on the Webmaster Central blog today offering some tips on how to recognize and avoid duplicate content on your website. I wanted to offer some specific tips on how to recognize and remove duplicate content on your self-hosted WordPress blog and decided to create a video tutorial.

This video doesn’t cover all of the bases; however, it will help quite a bit towards the prevention as well as the removal of duplicate content from your blog. Keep in mind, there is a fear about duplicate content and often people say that having duplicate content on your blog is bad. I can’t say that it’s a good thing, but I don’t think it’s something that should be considered as being bad. The reason for that is simple. Google understands that many bloggers aren’t very computer savvy. Instead, they are people who simply enjoy writing about their day, or telling the world about their opinions and views, etc. In other words, most bloggers aren’t programmers, nor are they SEO experts.

That said, if duplicate content was really a BAD thing, then it’s very likely that Google would have display duplicate content in the results. Knowing this, I think Google does a really good job at automatically determining source content. And what I mean by that is this. With a WordPress blog, a copy of your post content is found in multiple sections Typically, a copy of a post can be found on the homepage, category page, tag page, and in yearly/monthly/weekly/daily archives; however, source url for a blog is the individual post page.

Overall, Google understands the linking structure of WordPress and other blog platforms and for the most part gets things right. However, there’s many situations when that doesn’t happen. And with that, there’s ways that you can totally control and prevent Google from indexing multiple copies of your blog posts. Take a look at this video to learn how you can prevent and remove duplicate content from getting indexed on your WordPress blog.

The first step is to recognize if your WordPress blog has duplicate content indexed in Google. You can do this by doing a site:query search as shown in these example image below:

The above screen shot illustrates this search: [site:garryconn.com "On SeoHosting.com I wrote an article offering"] or as shown below in this screen shot:

You’ll see that two listings appear in the above example. Google has a reference to my home page and the blog post page. Technically, this is duplicate content. However, this is what I call controllable duplicate content. In other words, even though Google has a record of the same content appearing on the home page as well as the post page, it’s a matter of time before the content will be bumped off the homepage due to the age of the page.

The problem that you may run into is when multiple sections of your blog are referenced to having the same article content such as the category section, archive section, and tag sections. Commonly people think that this is bad and that Google will crack a whip and ban your blog because of this, but really the only concern is that you’re allowing Google to make the decision on determining which version of your content is the source copy.

The easiest solution is to install two WordPress plugins. The first one is called XML-Sitemaps. The second plugin is called the All-In-One SEO Pack. In the video above, I quickly show you how to set these plugins up; however, you may have some questions regarding the configuration, so by all means ask questions if you have them. Drop a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out.

A sitemap is a file that allows for search engines to quickly and easily find newly published content on your web site or blog. The sitemap.xml file has been widely adopted as the industry standard among popular search engines including, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.

If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog, creating and maintaining a sitemap can’t be made easier. Arne Brachhold has provided the WordPress community with a wonderful WordPress Plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin is great because it does everything for you automatically. You don’t need to worry about having to learn how to make your own sitemap.xml file, which quite honestly can be very complicated to create and very difficult to maintain.

Once installed, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin will create a Google compliant XML sitemap and even create a proper robots.txt file which will direct the Googlebot to your sitemap so that it can quickly and easily find your newly published content and also easily check for updates on your existing posts.

In addition to being Goole compliant, The Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin is also compliant with Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. Installing this plugin couldn’t be made any easier and the process involved in to different than installing any other standard WordPress plugin.

Some of the features included with this plugin is as follows:

Google XML Sitemaps Features:

Screen Shot of The Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugin: