Most of use would have already upgraded to the latest version of WordPress - 2.3 by now and one of the main features included in this new version is the “Canonical URLs”.

What is Canonical URLs?

Basically Canonical URLs will appeal more to the SEO concious blogger but if i’m being honest it also should appeal to every single WordPress user, if you had a post in your WordPress blog entitled “Rihanna is sexy” and your using the /%postname%/ structure in your permalinks than your post would look like this:

http://yourblog.com/rihanna-is-sexy

Now, that doesn’t sound like rocket science but that same exact post could also be located at this URL’s:

http://www.yourblog.com/rihanna-is-sexy

http://www.yourblog.com/rihanna-is-sexy/

http://www.yourblog.com/?p=20 (assuming your post ID is 20)

http://yourblog.com/?p=20

and a few other variants, you get the picture i believe.

Now you may ask yourself what’s the problem with that? well there would be no problem if you see if from a reader/human point of view but Google and other search engines see two different pages and penalize one as duplicate content, and now that becomes a problem indeed.

To fix this in previous versions of WordPress, bloggers have resorted to applying some codes in their .htacess file, but that is no longer needed in 2.3.

To find out more about Canonical URLs i suggest a reading of Mark’s Blog.

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