I’ve posted quite a few different times on adding a unique description to your WordPress categories.  The last time I spoke about it was here.

The most recent update from my journey in using this technique on one of these sites is that I discovered that when your category gets spread over more than one page, the description gets repeated as well.

At the moment Google is just ignoring this as it’s only a few of my categories that have been affected. However, as the site grows so will the duplicated content – and I’m not at all comfortable with that sort of thing on my sites if I can possibly avoid it.

Just (Another) Simple Line of Code

A very kind friend of mine helped me out with this as it’s several million light years beyond my abilities.  If you replace the little snippet that makes your theme display the description with this one: -

<?php if (strpos($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], “/page/”) === FALSE) { print(category_description()); } ?>

That should do the trick nicely. It certainly worked on my site.

Why Bother Kirsty?

Most likely Google will continue to ignore it for quite some time, so I don’t think this was an urgent fix.  However, the way I like to think about a duplicate content penalty is a large (and possibly menacing) robot type chappie standing with a set of scales with which to measure my content. Should the Djinn of Dupe Content plant his thumb too heavily on the aforementioned scales it’s penalty time, the symptoms of which are an unpleasant “cardiac arrest” type shape on my beloved site stats.

Anything I can do nice and early to avoid a cardiac arrest like sensation around my own heart department seems like a great way to spend a quick five minutes in any working day.

• Adding Unique Descriptions to WordPress Categories – Affiliate Quick Tips
• Affiliate Quick Tips – WordPress Category Excerpts
• Kirsty’s Affiliate Quick Tips – WordPress Plugin To Allow HTML in Category Descriptions