14.11. Fixing duplicate post issues

First, please see Defining how posts are marked as duplicate guide. If setting the criteria for checking duplicate posts did not solve the issue, please keep reading.

The plugin uses target post’s URL to make sure the post is not saved before. Please make sure there are no variables in the target post’s URL. If there is no variable in the post URL, then, the URL might have been changed by the target site.

Let’s take this URL as an example: http://domain.com/post.html?rank=10. Here, rank=10 is a variable, because it may change in the future. For instance, it may become rank=11. In this case, even if the URL is different, the post is the same. The plugin cannot understand that these URLs point to the same post. So, you need to remove variable part from the URL. For example, you need to remove ?rank=10 part. Then, the URL becomes http://domain.com/post.html. In this case, even if the variable part of the URL is changed by the target site, the plugin knows that it is the same post. By this way, you can avoid duplicate posts.

Another case might be that the target post’s URL is changed, but its content is the same as before. For example, the URL might become http://domain.com/post-2.html. In this case, you can define the post’s title or post’s content as a criteria that should be used to check whether the post is duplicate or not. If the title and/or content stayed the same, the post will not be saved again (See: Check duplicate posts via). Otherwise, there is no way for the plugin to know that this URL points to the post that was saved via http://domain.com/post.html. So, this is directly related to the target site.

If your case is different than the cases above, there might a problem with your server, because the plugin makes sure that the same URL is not crawled more than once.