Matt Cutts is Publishing Duplicate Content on His WordPress Blog — And So Are You

Due to a bug in the popular WordPress blogging platform, Matt Cutts is now officially publishing duplicate content on his WordPress blog. If you haven’t yet applied the fix, so are you! No, this isn’t the same tired old duplicate content vulnerability that’s due to bad theme design or poor permalink choices — it’s a a bona fide bug.

Reported over at WhereElseToPutIt.com is news that Matt Cutts is publishing duplicate content on his WordPress blog — plus an explanation of the bug (which also affects Movable Type, by the way) and how to fix it.

Some of the biggest names in the blogosphere are being affected by the bug, including some of the top SEO consultants and smaller affiliate specialists. At least one affiliate specialist (hello, Brian) is automatically inviting duplicate content problems by including each post’s ID as a suffix on the permalink URL: the exact same content can be reached without the post ID in the URL, or in fact with any number at all in that position, or with nothing in that position. And every time he sends out a post via his aweber-managed mailing list, that unnecessarily-encumbered URL is going out to loads of readers. (Are you using a third-party paid service like aweber to run your mailing list for you, by the way? Why oh why oh why? There are perfectly decent open source solutions out there that do a better job of RSS-to-email, and you can do exactly what you want with your list.) Another site I just learned about via a recent post of Brian’s is Mark’s, and his blog is affected, too. (At least he doesn’t use aweber…)

Anyway, if you haven’t yet applied the fix to protect yourself from massive quantities of internal duplicate content in your WordPress blog, you owe it to yourself to grab it now and get the problem sorted. (Yes, I’ve already protected this blog against the problem.)

This article was last updated on Wednesday, 8th August 2007 at 2:55 pm and is filed in the General Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing section. You can leave a response below.

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