SEO and Wordpress Archive Pages

Since moving from blogger to wordpress I have been spending a lot of time working on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), so that my blog ranks highly. SEO can take a lot of time and I’m still in the early stages, but something I have discovered is that google has been indexing my archive pages.

The problem with this is that google sees these archive pages as duplicate content. For example http://www.thinkjim.com/2005/09/ contains a post about a microsoft windows training course, but this post is also a web page in its own right (http://www.thinkjim.com/2005/09/m2276-implementing-a-microsoft-
windows-server-2003-network-infrastructure.html). This counts as duplicate content and can effect your google pagerank.

To get around this i’ve learnt that you need to stop google indexing the archive pages and this can be achieved by adding a line of code to the header.php file – this forms part of your wordpress theme.

<?php if(is_archive()){ ?><meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"><?php } ?>

If you put the line of code above into your header.php file it will tell google (and other search engines) not to index any pages that are archive pages, but the search engine will look inside archive pages for links to other pages (i.e. posts). If it finds a link it will follow it and index the linked page.