Kill 'Duplicate Content' On Your WordPress Blogs, Go CANONICAL!
About Andrew WilsonLong time marketer and infopreneur. I have been making a living online since 2005 and helping others do the same since almost as long.
Trained as an economist with particular interest in the transition economies of the FSU.
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Firstly, can I note that there is no real 'Duplicate Content Penalty' but there are duplicate content filters. According to Google penalties only apply to people who are intentionally adding content to the internet to game the SE algorithms. Us ordinary folks need not worry. However, having duplicated content on your website is not such a good idea. SEs are pretty good at sorting out the content that we webmasters want the world to see and we often work to improve things by 'shaping' the SE bot traffic through our websites and blogs.
I was thinking though, wouldn't it be better if rather than having to say which classes of content we wanted indexed in advance by using tools such as All In One SEOn on our WordPress blogs we could choose which content we wanted Google, Bing or Yahoo! to index more directly?
Well, I went on a hunt and found out about the Canonical URL tag introduced by Google a while back and recognised by Yahoo! and Bing. What this does is to tell SEs that content tagged as 'canonical' will be the content that is indexed and shown to searchers. So, in effect if all our pages and posts, as added by us to our sites were tagged as canonical we'd not need to worry about tag pages, archives or category list pages.
Hmmm… this should have a plugin!
Well, it does!
Have a look at Yoast Tweaking Websites blog where you can download a plugin to manage your content.
This plugin will not solve all the duplicate content issues that WordPress throws up but it'll help in a way that is unobtrusive and easy.
