[wp-hackers] Canonical integration into core

[Lynne Pope]

2009/2/19 Joost de Valk <joost at yoast.com>

> On Feb 18, 2009, at 2:07 PM, Lynne Pope wrote:
>
>  There is no need to add meta data tags to handle this situation.
>> Search engines that respect robots.txt all honour this, and have done for
>> years. I use pretty permalinks and none of my /permalink?anything is
>> indexed. This also prevents indexing of search pages (which strangely
>> enough
>> do get linked to). Depending on how the site uses these non-standard URL's
>> though there can be a loss of link juice by blocking them at robots level.
>>
>> Disallow: /*?*
>> Disallow: /*?
>>
>>
> Lynne,
>
> you don't get it, I'm afraid. When you're blocking those pages from being
> indexed, you're also blocking the search engines from allowing those links
> to help your rankings. If you use the rel=canonical, you allow them to index
> it, and they use the links toward that "faulty" URL to improve the rankings
> of the page you set as canonical (provided they have (almost) the same
> content).
>
> Best,
> Joost
>

Joost, with respect, did I not say that depending on how the site uses these
non-standard URL's there can be a loss of link juice with using the robots
method?

I was simply pointing out that there is more than one way to skin a cat. The
same can be achieved by using PHP to set locations in HTTP headers, or to
serve the correct page to search bots or...

Sorry, but not all sites use non-WP-generated URL's and not all require link
juice from them. I am not trying to argue against inclusion of the canonical
URL tag (gave up on that ages ago) but was simply pointing out that its not
necessary for all sites.

Lynne