If you’re using the WP-Email plugin [previous version] for WordPress, be aware that a lot of extra pages will be indexed in Google as duplicate content unless you exclude crawling via robots.txt. The program creates a Javascript link to a PopUp Window which will be crawled as a seperate file (but duplicate content) for each of your posts. Here’s an example of the URL in Google:
wp-content/plugins/email/wp-email-popup.php?p=44
The problem: a page like that is created for each of your posts, resulting in duplicate content and potential guarantees penalties.
The solution: Easy. Add the following to your robots.txt file, changing the filename where appropriate:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content
This tells the robots to ignore any content that begins with the string ‘wp-content’ & which includes the Popup. It may take a few months weeks for Google Crawler to obey your command, but they will and the content will drop out. I disallowed mine today, so I’ll be in a position to judge just how long it takes very soon, I hope. I’ll take a look at the rest of the indexed pages today and probably have some more recommendations for exclusions soon, but for sure this repetitive popup page isn’t needed.
