[wp-hackers] Canonical integration into core

Thu Feb 19 04:36:27 GMT 2009

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 1:10 AM, Joost de Valk <joost at yoast.com> wrote:
> It's not just about what WordPress does. For example:
>
> http://example.com/about/
>
> and
>
> http://example.com/about/?from=email
>
> will serve up the same pages in most WordPress installs. If you add the
> rel="canonical" link to the <head>, the latter will have all links pointing
> to it counted toward the first one. That's, for me, one of the main uses of
> the tag.

Fixing a problem that WordPress doesn't create is not something that
should be in core, it's something for a plugin to fix.

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 4:21 AM, scribu <scribu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wait...there's also /post-permalink?replytocom=123 which is triggered when
> there's no Javascript enabled (a.k.a. bots) that could also use
> rel="canonical".

That link is nofollowed, so it shouldn't be an issue.

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 9:03 AM,  <mikeschinkel at newclarity.net> wrote:
> Not being "native" to WordPress seems to be a rather myopic justification.
> HTTP isn't native to WordPress but we still need to utilize best practices
> regarding HTTP.

The canonical link tag and HTTP are completely different things, and
can't be used for comparison. HTTP is a protocol very necessary to the
Internet, the canonical tag is not necessary for a stock WP install
with paged comments turned off.

There is no reason for this tag to be useful for any case that
WordPress creates (again, with the exception of paged comments), so
this tag should not be enabled by default.

-- 
Matt Freedman
Blog: http://mattsblog.ca/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/mattfreedman