Comments on: Canonical URLs to help WordPress duplicate content issue

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:50:16 +0000

Anybody know of a plugin that inserts customizable canonicals to category pages?

By: Keith Davis

Keith Davis — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:22:15 +0000

I’m struggling with this duplicate content business in wordpress. For a static site it’s simple, don’t repeat yourself. But for wordpress you have home page content showing full post, archives, categories… not sure what else!
I guess the answer is a theme with canonical url’s included as Ovidiu says.
Thanks for making things a little clearer.

By: Just-a-Guest

Just-a-Guest — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:28:04 +0000

The issue is not about google penalizing and they always want you to stop worrying about it. Even if they are not directly penalizing you, you definitely should worry about it.

The real issue is more like this: you have some urls generated by your page about awesome blue widgets.

site.com/widgets/blue/awesome-blue-widgets
site.com/tags/new-products/awesome-blue-widgets
site.com/archive/jan/04/09/awesome-blue-widgets

Now google chooses the last link to be the main one and only that one gets indexed. Now you miss all the lovely URL structure and keywords in your address and your page ranks poorly compared to what would happen if it chose the first URL.

And they say, “Don’t worry about it, we will figure it out.” But yes that IS EXACTLY what I’m worried about.

If google is so fcking smart, as Matt claims, then why is there so much spam in their index these days?

By: Introspective

Introspective — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:17:52 +0000

I used to publish my articles, but now I wander should I stop doing this, because the risk of duplicate content penalty. Should I stop publish my articles on article directories?

By: ovidiu

ovidiu — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:46:02 +0000

fortunately I recently switched to the hybrid theme and canonical urls are already included

By: John : Christchurch NZ

John : Christchurch NZ — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:11:17 +0000

Looks good but I wonder how it helps when you have identical content on your home page as a teaser paragraph then the same content on the blog page.

Imagine a blog about songs – the home page has the first verse of 10 songs and each song has its own page – how does google decide if the home page or the song page is the right place ?

By: Sudipta

Sudipta — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:09:01 +0000

Now I am confused!
It is really dumb of Google not to be able to identify the duplicate content. WordPress is a popular vehicle, google should be smart about this.

By: Fortuente

Fortuente — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:02:55 +0000

Alas I have experienced first-hand issues with WordPress and duplicate penalization in Google, at least. Even if Google has already or improves in the future their search to mitigate this behavior I will likely always be overly paranoid about it.

I myself always prefer the theme route to the plug-in route where it is possible, however. Off the top of my head, I suppose the following would work in header.php?

” />

Or would it require more? I guess I have something to play around with now when I get the time.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:43:50 +0000

@George – But surely a tag page would not be treated as having a canonical URL with a post?

By: george

george — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:03:34 +0000

Well actually no Ryan you are wrong…

For example at my blog i have a post that is giving away seo tips…Google ranks the tag of my post higher than the actual post Considering this i don’t think that the machine os so smart…

Canonical urls are pretty damn useful for wordpress…