Thread

I’m not sure if this has been mentioned, but last week the big 3 search engines finally agreed on a new link element to clean up most duplicate content once and for all (theoretically). Basically, what this means is you can stick a tag such as:

<link rel="canonical" value="http://www.example.com/index.php/template_group/template/{url_title}/"/>

—or however you choose to handle it—in your header templates and they will index your site properly regardless of how people choose to link to you.

Read more about it from Matt Cutts (Google web spam guy).

I’ve just created a plugin that will generate these tags, but if you’re feeling adventurous you can just use the fetch_current_uri() function to do the same trick.

Here’s an article on Google’s webmaster blog written by an engineer from their indexing team.  What I also found interesting when I read this earlier this month is the link in the first paragraph to this post, which in summary states that duplicate content “penalties” do not exist, at least, not how the SEO-obsessed generally portray it.  I admit to being hoodwinked by the viral madness into thinking it was a potentially serious issue.