Resolving WordPress Duplicate Content

1. Normalizing Trailing Slashes & Letter Cases

Search engines treat example.com/page and example.com/page/ (or uppercase example.com/PAGE) as distinct URLs. If both return 200 OK status codes, crawlers will flag duplicate pages.

# Force trailing slash on all WordPress URLs
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

2. Fixing Taxonomy & Archive Duplication

WordPress dynamically builds archive views for tags, categories, author pages, and calendars (date archives). If you only have one author, your author archive is identical to your homepage. If your posts have multiple overlapping tags, they create heavy duplication.

• Noindex Author & Date Archives: In your SEO plugin (Yoast or RankMath), set Author Archives and Date Archives to noindex.
• Disable Unused Taxonomies: Do not use both extensive Tags and Categories. Use Categories for broad topic clusters, and disable/noindex tags.

3. Restricting Parameter and Pagination Crawl Waste

Search filtering parameters (e.g. ?color=blue or ?paged=2) spawn unlimited crawl routes. Without explicit canonical parameters or search-parameter policies, search bots will index thousands of duplicate listings.