Excerpt Editor provides a convenient place for creating and editing all summary excerpts on your site. It can also add custom excerpts for pages (not possible without a plugin).
Features:
- auto-creating excerpts when publishing new Posts and Pages
- displaying customisable excerpts from the content for posts without an excerpt
- replacing the content for all archive and tags pages with excerpts (eliminates content duplication for SEO).
This last item is one of it’s most valuable functions. When search engines are looking at your site to index the content, some of your content can appear to show as duplicated—once in the original post, and then again on archives pages where they are listed together with other articles (archive pages are anyplace on your site where posts show up in a running list… like the Blog page, category pages, and search results pages).
Many search engines are designed to view anything that’s duplicate content as an attempt to game the system. The rationale being that the site may be purposefully stacking the deck by repeating important content in he hopes that it will be ranked higher. Given that possibility, the search engines will then depreciate the ranking in response.
By using the Excerpt Editors setting to automatically excerpt the first 70 to 130 words on all archive pages, it guarantees that the copy is only presented in full ONCE on the actual post page. On the archive pages, the excerpted copy is appended with a helpful “continue reading link” so that the human users can easily hop directly to the post page to read the entire article.
Learn more at the Excerpt Editor home page, or on the WordPress.com Plugin page