Canonical URL’s for WordPress

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This plugin helps you solve duplicate content issues on your site. It's not the cure for all evil, but it will make it easier by preventing tagged URL's from being indexed.

Suppose you have read my Twitter Analytics post, and you've started tagging all the URL's you spread on Twitter with Google Analytics campaign variables. So at some point, a search engine would enter your site through this URL:

http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter
&utm_campaign=twitter

If it did, in "old times", this would mean you'd have a duplicate content issue: the same content indexed under two different URL's. An issue SEO's have been trying to solve on web pages for ages, which sometimes created huge limitations. This is where the canonical element, and thus this plugin, comes in. The plugin will add this code to the <head> section of your page:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoast.com/twitter/analytics/"/>

And now, the search engine will suddenly count the links it has seen to that campaign tagged URL, towards the canonical URL, and not index the campaign tagged URL anymore. Simple, yet effective.

This feature works with Google, and both Live Search and Yahoo! have announced they will be supporting it shortly.

Want to know more? Check out this video by Matt Cutts of Google who explains the new element in-depth: