Thread: Handling Duplicate Content When Creating A Static Front Page in Wordpress

Creating a static front page in wordpress is something which was new to me.

I've been playing around with it today and identified potential duplicate content problems.

Even though when you create a new page which gets displayed on the front page, the original page which you created (even though the permalinks are changed to the root) still displays the same content, hence the duplicate content issue.

So if you are using static pages in wordpress, make sure to 301 redirect the "Home"page which you created for the front page content in .htaccess or using the redirection plugin, so the duplicate page gets redirected to the homepage.

Hope this helps.

I handle potential duplicate content issues on the front page of Wordpress by simply creating unique excerpts for each article. (See here.) Most themes support them - and if they don't, it is just a matter of adding one line of code to make sure they do. This method is much simpler than creating a static front page, in my opinion.

You can also help stop duplicate content by not allowing search engines to index your category pages. I recommend these SEO-related plugins:
All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Redirection, Robots Meta, SEO Slugs

Kovich I didn't create a static front page to prevent duplicate content on the homepage.

I was using post excerpts when I displayed the latest posts on the front page, but I wanted a static page instead to get away from the normal "blog" site. I'm using wordpress more like a cms.

The advice I gave was to prevent duplicate content problems if you decide to use a static front page.

Oh, I'm sorry, Dcristo - I misunderstood your post!

I thought you were suggesting the creation of a static page to avoid duplicate content! :P

Wordpress is more of a blogging software than a CMS. I just started building a site in Drupal and it much easier to build good navigation with menus and drupal taxonomy. The taxonomy tags and categories show excerpts which cut down on duplicate content issues.