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.
Filed under Blog Setups, Blogging Tools, Install WordPress by on Mar 25th, 2010. Comment. 
Over the years I have tried and used a load of WordPress installers. Most of these products ahve not been very good. The best I found for a long time was from Mass Automation, WPInstaller, a product still being sold. I have found an alternative and at very low cost. Here it is: Desktop WordPress Mass Blog Installer & Manager This tool does a fine job of installing WordPress along with your choices of themes and plugins both of which can be activated automatically.
I really liked that I could add up to 10 pages to the site at setup so that I can have all my 'admin pages': About, Privacy, Disclaimers etc all ready to go saving quite a lot of time. In addition I can set up the inital post, the blogroll, categories etc etc.
The tool also functions as a WordPress blog manager and enables the webmaster to update versions, themes and plugins from the desktop and to multiple sites in one go.
If this tool included a blog poster that enabled me to submit content to my blogs without logging into the site then I'd be a very happy man. However coming soon is and Article Poster and Article Creator tool within the installer. If these actually show up then this will for the current price of just $29 be an absolute steal.
Take a look for yourself, there is a demo version available from the sales site: Check this!
Filed under Blog Setups, Blogging Tools, Install WordPress, Reviews by on Mar 18th, 2010. Comment.
When we were building lots of blogs for other people we discovered that the search engines seemed to particularly relish content on the static pages.
We would add content to static pages that defined the style and theme of the site and once the pages were indexed they'd often be among the best ranked pages on the sites we made.
There is a problem though – our basic promotion strategy was to syndicate the rss feeds from these sites to a network of rss directories and aggregators and, as you probably already know, WordPress does not include pages within the feeds it produces. This meant that the first pages to be indexed were rarely the best quality content for which we wanted the sites to be known.
The normal way round this is to make a short post that links to the page but this can be quite time consuming.
Today I came across a plugin that helps a lot. This plugin, when activated, adds pages to one's rss feeds. Rss Includes Pages is by Marios Alexandrou and works on Wordpress versions from 2.5 onward.
Here is a link to Marios' blog where there are user comments on the plugin.
One important point, if you want to use the plugin to publicise pages on a new site but do not want to continue having pages in your feeds then you simply deactivate the plugin and pages will no longer be shown. No muss, no fuss!
Filed under Blog Promotion, Blog Setups, Blogging Tools, Ideas and Tips, Install WordPress, Reviews by on Apr 17th, 2009. Comment.
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