Regular Problogger reader, Darren McLaughlin reports that the WP Poll plugin by the name of Democracy has some SEO problem with it as it creates multiple pages with the same content – something Google doesn’t like (it considers it to be duplicate content).
Read Darren’s post at Wordpress Democracy Plugin: Warning! SEO Nightmare
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from this new and dynamic medium from blogs like Digital Photography School and TwiTip - Twitter Tips.
Back in 2002 I stumbled upon an article about ‘Blogging’. I didn’t know it at the time but that moment changed my life. Since then I've become a full time blogger and have blogged on over 20 blogs and co-founded the b5media blog network.
You can connect with me via social media sites at Facebook (friend limit reached) - Facebook Fan Page - LinkedIn - ProBlogger on Twitter (also ProBlogger.com on Twitter) - SU - FriendFeed - Digg
7 Responses to “Wordpress Democracy Plugin Warning” - Add Yours
Technology Slice
September 18th, 2006 1:38 pm
Google definitely objects to duplicate content. Thanks for the heads up.
Nancy
September 18th, 2006 3:19 pm
Thank you — I’ve been using Democracy for a few months now (and really liking it), but I had no idea about any SEO issues.
Sneakfilm.de
September 18th, 2006 9:41 pm
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Adnan
September 19th, 2006 2:22 am
Thanks for letting us know about the article Darren.
Now Im just worried and want to know how much this will affect my SEO!! Good news also that the Democracy guys are making an update to the plugin which will be released in a few days.
writingUp
September 20th, 2006 4:40 am
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Joe Banner
September 20th, 2006 6:29 am
What can I do to get Google and the other SE’s to correct this?
Nick
November 19th, 2006 1:05 pm
I was informed by a fellow blogger to include the following in your robots.txt “Disallow: /?” ,but I think if you have dynamic pages and you don’t use permalinks, then you may not want to use this method. as all your dynamic pages may not be indexed.
I use permalinks on my wordpress site, so i used this method. apparently, the democracy plugin was adding the following extension to your url “?jal_no_js=true&poll_id=2″ , but the content was the same. Thank goodness my new blog is very new and I was able to catch it..
So, a fellow blogger suggested to use “Dissalow: /?” on your robots.txt
It worked for him.
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