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Quick note on WordPress SEO using the WP-Email plugin

by Darren

If you’re using the WP-Email plugin 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:

pp-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 penalties

The solution: it’s 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 for Google 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.