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Yet Another Duplicate Content Vulnerability Hits WordPress, Movable Type Blogs (Part 1)
By Greg | August 2, 2007
This isn’t the same tired old WordPress ‘vulnerability’ you’ve already heard so much about (i.e., the fact that certain WordPress permalink choices and theme designs will cough up the same article content via multiple URLs). No, this one is actually a bug in both WordPress and Movable Type, a bug which causes these blogging platforms to deliver the same content via a potentially infinite number of different URLs. If you’re not already using the fix provided here, your blog is at risk of showing massive quantities of duplicate content to search engines — enough to dilute the relevance of your real content with a flood of identical copies.
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August 2nd, 2007 at 4:27 pm
[...] over at Where Else to Put It? is a new duplicate content vulnerability that is affecting both WordPress and Movable Type blogs. What is duplicate content, and why should [...]
August 9th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Dumb question – where are the links to these pages with numbers appended to the urls? If there aren’t any links then Google won’t index them and no problem surely?
August 9th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Hi Donncha,
Hey, many thanks for stopping by!
(For any readers who might not be familiar with the real brains behind WordPress, Donncha is the lead developer for the multi-user version of the software.)
Nope, it’s not a dumb question at all. The answer is that in an ideal world, there wouldn’t be any links with extraneous page numbers appended to the URL. But unfortunately, all it takes is for a person who wants to compromise the search engine visibility of a website to start publishing such links anywhere that a search engine can find them and crawl them. Anywhere will do: some junky forum somewhere, a site of their own, a direct submission to Google, a bit of blog comment spam, etc.
The point is that the links to duplicate content don’t have to be important, or authoritative, or even ever seen by a human being: all it takes is for a search engine bot to see them, and the damage is done.
All the best,
Greg
August 11th, 2007 at 6:11 am
[...] Mulhauser brought into my attention a Duplicate Content Vulnerability present in WordPress and Movable [...]
October 8th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
[...] Mulhauser brought into my attention a Duplicate Content Vulnerability present in WordPress and Movable [...]
January 16th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
I do not support the idea that an attacker would go such long miles to try and hurt any website.
Most SEO aware webmasters place noindex to archives and category pages, etc.
Nice find though -)
December 22nd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Hi guys, I think this is really a useful blog to hang out and to get some knowledgable content.