Using Excerpts on Index Pages of Your Wordpress Theme to Improve Pagerank
December 15th, 2007, Posted in Wordpress TipsAs many of you may already know, having site pages with duplicate content can hurt your search engine rankings. One way to avoid duplicate content penalization is to use ‘noindex’ and ‘noarchive’ tags on all but the main, full content pages.
Another tool for fighting duplicate content penalization is to use <?php the_excerpt();?> rather than <?php the_content();?> in all the index files of your theme.
You would make this replacement in index.php, as well as any additional index templates your theme may contain, such as category.php, search.php, archive etc.
What this does is shorten the content on index pages to minimize duplicate content.
Even better
When using <?php the_excerpt();?> in your index theme files, you can wipe out duplicate content altogether by filling in the ‘optional excerpt’ field when you write/edit a post.
If left empty the first portion of the content will appear wherever you’ve placed <?php the_excerpt();?>, but if you use the ‘Optional Excerpt’ field, the text entered there will appear instead. The nice thing about this, besides avoiding duplicate content, is that you can control exactly how long the ‘excerpt’ is, as ALL text in ‘Optional Excerpt’ will be displayed.
