Canonical URLs and WordPress

[Douglas Karr]

People don't realize it, but WordPress publishes your content out through a number of paths when you have permalinks (highly recommended) turned on. You can get to your content by tag, by category, by archive, by page (next, previous), and usually by www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com - etc., etc.

This actually hurts your ranking with search engines because people may be linking to the same exact content but from different URLs! That means that a post that you did that a lot of folks liked isn't getting all the credit it deserves. Recently, Google released a method for content management systems to handle this - called canonical URLs.

And of course, within hours a wordpress canonical URL plugin was born! I'd highly recommend installing it when you get the chance.

Compendium Blogware is testing canonical URLs right now as well for its clients. It's a great feature for any content management system that has multiple paths to the identical content. You can watch a movie about canonical URLs here... or you can just ignore it as some goofy geek thing. Either way - install the plugin. I promise it will help!

[Patric Welch]

Speaking of plugins, Doug. You are the most "plugged-in" guy I know!

[Kevin Hood]

Great tip Doug! This can really hurt your relationship with Google. An old way of fixing this problem was editing the robots.txt as in this example: http://www.askapache.com/seo/updated-robotstxt-for-wordpress.html

A one-click plugin makes it a lot easier though.