[wp-hackers] Canonical integration into core

[Otto]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Lynne Pope <lynne.pope at gmail.com> wrote:
> Amazing too that the reaction to opposition to the proposal should be
> comments that I don't know what I am talking about.

Well, until you actually explain what you're talking about, you seem
to be spouting gibberish.

I do want give you the benefit of the doubt, but you really need to
explain things like this further:

> The inclusion of the canonical URL link in the core will cause problems for
> a number of users. For example, where I have ported content from other apps
> I have retained the URL through the HTTP/1.1 standard for content location.
> I know of a number of other sites who also use this specification - which
> will conflict with the Google canonical URL implementation.

That needs a better explanation. Really. Because it doesn't make any sense.

What, exactly, will having a link rel=canonical do to your site that
will harm SEO? What will it do to a normal WordPress site? Please
explain to us what the heck you're talking about, so that we can
understand what you're getting at.

I submit that every WordPress based site, which has not been heavily
customized, can benefit from this tag. Mainly, the new comments paging
creates duplicate content pages in the singular post/page sections
which were not there before.

> The new Google tag is designed for duplicate content. WordPress already
> provides many ways of ensuring duplicate content is not indexed.

No. The canonical tag is indeed designed for duplicate content, but it
is not designed to prevent duplicate content from being indexed. It's
to keep it indexed under a single URL.

> The tag is NOT designed to be in the header of every page.

Yes, in point of fact, it is. It is designed exactly for that. Or, at
least, to be in the header of pages that can have multiple URLs which
contain the same content. And with 2.7 and paged comments, that's
every single post page.