Hi. I'm Barbara Swafford & I'd like to welcome you to Blogging Without A Blog. Grab a seat, share your thoughts and join in the conversation. 
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Today’s Lesson
In an effort to reduce the amount of duplicate content I found on my blog pages, the first this was to use a plugin.
The plugin I am using, is named: Homepage Excerpts WordPress Plugin written by Daniel Scocco. Thank you Daniel.
What this easy to install, plugin does, is to give you the option of showing excerpts, instead of full posts.
I don’t necessarily like that the fact that a reader who comes into my blog via the homepage, can only read one full post, and then has to click on others to read the full content. However, if I can avoid the duplicate content issue, hopefully my readers will understand.
On the bright side, it does give readers a chance to scroll through previous posts fairly quickly, and they can determine which ones they may want to read. And…the excerpts take up less space than a full post would.
Today’s Assignment
Look at your homepage.
How many full posts does it include?
Should you consider adding the Homepage Excerpts WordPress Plugin? Or, use another method of excerpting your older posts?
If you are not using WordPress, does your blogging platform have an option you can use to avoid duplicate content?
Hello Barbara,
Actually, I like it when index page is only showing the summary. Then you will have a quick overview of all the articles.
Also did you have the list “what others are reading” before? Maybe, I just did not notice it before. I like the list, then, I can go back to your old good articles quickly.
By the way, I have a very basic question. I notice that you have “diggs” at the end of the article. What is it supposed to do? I do not have it on my blog. Does it really help?
Hi Asako,
Where I have “What others are reading”, used to be “popular posts ” (most viewed), but I changed it to rank the posts by the number of comments, as I think others may like to see what my loyal commenters have to say.
I kept my “recently written” in a separate column, and that makes it easy to scan my last 15 posts.
The “Digg” chicklet is something I have been experimenting with, as I sometimes submit posts to Digg. I don’t really think it helps, unless you have a lot of loyal Digg traffic. By showing the chicklet, a reader can submit your article to Digg. Each time your article is “Dugg”, the number increases.
Digg is another social network, to which you can submit articles, in hopes of bringing traffic to your site. The chicklet is not necessary to do so.
Thanks for the info Barbara. I never realised the index page could cause problems in this way. I tried a different plugin, but I couldn’t get it to work, so I’ll try the one you suggested.
Hi Catherine,
This plugin worked well for me.
I’m in the middle of reducing any duplicate content, so I’m hoping showing excerpts will reduce some of it. Combining that with a robots.txt file, and a sitemap, should get me close to no duplication.
I’m keeping a close eye on Google’s webmaster tools for my account.
[...] This week’s lessons have been about duplicate content. [...]