Wordpress is becoming easier and easier to use with every release. This doesn’t mean you should overlook any details when setting up a new wordpress install (or when looking at an older install). What I want to talk about today is using the more tag to prevent content from being seen as duplicate. A base setup of wordpress is not duplicate content safe. There are many pages which may contain duplicate content. These include posts, archive pages, the home page and tag pages. The more tag will not solve the issue on all of these pages, but it does work for your home and archive pages. The more tag is found on the edit bar at the top of your wordpress post editor.

This button will insert a horizontal separator at the current location of the cursor. Everything above this will be shown as a post excerpt, and everything after will only be visible when viewing the full post. A ‘read more’ or ‘view full post’ link of some type will be added to the home/archive page where the post is displayed. You avoid the duplicate content penalty here because the full text of the post is now only displayed on the post page. You can see the outcome of this on my site. Each post has an excerpt at the top (sometimes just an image) and the full post content is only displayed after you choose to read more.

If you would like to read more about preventing duplicate content issues with wordpress is your robots.txt file. I have written a post on that here.