http://www.bryanhadaway.com/getting-started-with-your-first-wordpress-plugin/

If you could… let me know by tonight or I’ll go ahead and make it tomorrow.

Thanks, Bryan

I noticed that in my instructions above, the actual appropriate canonical link tag was stripped out because the comments area interpreted it as HTML. So where I said ‘and then in the home page settings for that plugin added ”’, don’t add a blank string of course, add the correct canonical link tag for your home page.

So, I would definitely recommend choosing either the WordPress default canonical solution or a canonical plugin. I don’t believe WordPress versions prior to 2.9 even have a default canonical link element, so that isn’t a worry. For newer versions, I believe there is a plugin to remove the default canonical and then it wouldn’t get in the way of updating.

I know there were some, but I’m not seeing any good ones, I may consider developing a “Remove Canonical” plugin.

It’s worth noting too that I just noticed another plugin, that can be very useful to assist canonical links:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-htaccess-control/

Thanks, Bryan

In the end, I went with a feature of the HeadSpace plugin, which I’m already been using, added a ‘raw data’ module and then in the home page settings for that plugin added ” for the raw data field. This at least covers my original intent, getting my front page ‘fixed’.

That said, for 3.0 users there’s still the need to do this in a nice and simple way, and for some people HeadSpace might be a lot of overhead. It really comes down to whether duplicate canonical links are going to harm you down the road.

Quickly disabling WordPress’ own canonical links programmatically still leaves it a lean and mean plugin with no visible user configuration.

http://sageblogger.com/tip-for-datafeedr-users-removing-rel-cannonical-why-and-how/

Let us know if this solution works if anyone’s tried it.

Thanks, Bryan

My suggestion was related to duplicate canonical link entries that your plugin now generates, since WordPress does its own. From another blog post, someone recommended adding remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘rel_canonical’ ); to your theme’s function.php to unregister WP’s default canonical link. That seemed sensible, but didn’t seem to work for me in the TwentyTen theme. You may want to consider integrating this approach into your own plugin when you get it working.

I think this plugin is just about perfect for 90% of WordPress users. But for those that have used WordPress for CMS for a serious store/shopping cart e-commerce website with thousands of products, they should definitely have a professional programmer alter the PHP of the plugin and create a custom .htaccess file, but websites of that scale are probably on top of it anyways.

I don’t think I ever want to create a version of the plugin that required any settings adjustments from the admin. I just want it to be activate and done. For those who have very specific custom needs I want to get problems and solutions going in the forum:

http://www.bryanhadaway.com/forum/canonical-link/

Thanks, Bryan

If however, 3.0 has other canonical URL bugs beyond not covering the front page, then it seems like more of a clear cut choice to use the plugin.

Of course, going the plugin route is a safe way to keep custom changes out of your template files and also means it’s a simpler choice for people not comfortable editing them.

The site in question where I implemented it is http://iosdevgoodies.joostschuur.com BTW.

Thanks, Bryan

Thanks, Bryan

If this person has any Google Alerts set up for his name, he should WATCH OUT!

http://indiapoint.net/ca/2006/02/27/articleship/ (no suggestion needed, no suggestion will occur)

http://indiapoint.net/ca/2006/02/27/articleship/comment-page-5/ (no suggestion needed, no suggestion will occur)

http://indiapoint.net/ca/2006/02/27/articleship/comment-page-4/ (no suggestion needed, no suggestion will occur)

Each of these pages will be respectively left alone, no suggestion will be needed. They will all be indexed the way they are as they should. You should want comment pages to be indexed because there are often rich info filled comments that can bring in visitors.

http://indiapoint.net/?s=training canonicalized as http://indiapoint.net/

This is good, it’s not really good practice or appropriate to index search pages anyways as this annoys most, to go from search results to more search results.

http://abcanylink.com/anything/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter canonicalized as http://abcanylink.com/anything/ respectively

Canonical links again are mere suggestions for Google. It’s an added technique, but not the only technique to consider, a good .htaccess file and seo-friendly permalinks are also advised.

If ever you didn’t want a page to be indexed, the proper method would be to use:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

in the head section. Here’s a WordPress plugin that could handle such a task:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-noindex-nofollow-tool/

I have to think about making the plugin universal or basic to cover the average need. There may certainly be other needs, this plugin could be customized very easily to someone’s specific need.

For example, perhaps some pages; you might want to block from being canonicalized altogether or changing how URL’s are canonicalized for specific pages. Right now, the plugin is at a pretty fair baseline of what should be expected from a canonicalized link.

All and all for people that want to canonicalize hundreds or even thousands of pages dynamically without doing it manually themselves or paying someone, it’s pretty decent. It might not get every page spot on of how you would do it manually, but it’ll certainly do a good job with most and better your site.

Again, it’s completely free an open source, if someone has a specific request for their own custom setup I could try and help, if I couldn’t I’m sure they could hire a programmer for 1 – 2 hours that could refine it to their specific websites needs.

Right now, I’m thinking it’s canonicalizing pretty good in most cases no differently than how someone would manually do it, so the only thing I’m thinking is that there might be pages that people just don’t want to canonicalize at all for whatever reason, so I’ll look more into that, shouldn’t be too difficult.

I’m also thinking of an alternate that might handle product pages a little differently, but I need more feedback first, lots of feedback. GOOD feedback like you’ve provided Anup and I appreciate that. When people just say they don’t like it or it doesn’t work, that’s pretty vague and subjective and doesn’t do anything in way of helping.

I started a subforum here for suggestions: http://www.bryanhadaway.com/forum/canonical-link/suggestions-for-improvement

Thanks, Bryan

Thanks, Bryan

And I give here an example from my website:

Say the link: http://indiapoint.net/ca/2006/02/27/articleship/

Now the above post has various comments to it. So, for smooth loading, I have put around ten commnet threads to be shown.on each page.

So, there are different pages that gets generated viz

http://indiapoint.net/ca/2006/02/27/articleship/comment-page-5/
http://indiapoint.net/ca/2006/02/27/articleship/comment-page-4/

etc.

Now, if there is only one canonical link, the above pages would have the canonical link of the original post viz. http://indiapoint.net/ca/2006/02/27/articleship/ So that would defeat the purpose.

However at the same time, there can be search links like http://indiapoint.net/?s=training So what would be the canonical link for such links?

At the same time, I would not like that search-engines pick up from somewhere link like http://abcanylink.com/anything/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter and count it as a link.

thanks

It should be generated in the default theme automatically, I’m not entirely sure.

I think it might only present itself on a “needed” basis. But, I just tested my blank WordPress 2.9.2 w/Default Template setup that I use for testing and I tried adding #test and ?test to URLs and I couldn’t get it to prompt a canonical link.

Which brings up another scenario of when a canonical link plugin could be useful… because even with the newest version of WordPress, it might be theme dependent if it’ll work or not because it’s served up in header.php.

I don’t think it does anything different than the plugin anyways, so I’d be interested to hear specific examples of problems. I did already update the plugin based on your suggestion Anup, so I am listening.

Thanks, Bryan

First of all, I don’t understand why you at a first place needed to create this functionality since it is included in WordPress core since version 2.9

Is it so, where is that in the admin panel? Or does it get generated ? I dont find it in the headers though.

You’re correct, in the newest versions of WordPress, canonical links are already in place, but this plugin covers WordPress versions as early as 1.2 which aren’t covered. Also, it’s worth mentioning that the WordPress native canonical link itself is flawed. It fails to even properly canonicalize home pages, this might be fixed in WordPress 3.0.

There’s no doubt that entering canonical links manually page by page would be the most “accurate” and ideal way to go about it.

But, as we know… if you have hundreds of pages that is definitely not practical. To elaborate more, the purpose of canonicalizing a link is to serve up to search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.) a cleaner more attractive, seo-friendly and user-friendly version of URLs.

Another important factor to consider is duplicate content; the same page, could be indexed several times in different formats and Google’s crawler could fail to understand that’s just one page, because the same content can be reached with so many variables;

http://www.website.com/, http://website.com/, http://www.website.com/index.php, http://website.com/index.php, http://www.website.com/#section1.2, http://www.website.com/?=section1.2&yes&on

It will suggest: http://www.website.com/ for that page

It strips off hash (#) and query (?) tags. It’s important to keep in mind that a canonical link does not actually change the browser URL or alter the page in any way, it only serves a suggestion for a cleaner URL to Google.

The Bottom Line:

My canonical link code/plugin is the best free, dynamic and hands-free way to implement canonical links into large-scale websites and WordPress blogs that I’m aware of. It can not hurt your website, it can only help it.

I emphasize the words dynamic and hands-free because there is another canonical link plugin to choose from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/canonical/ that might be better suited for you if you’re willing to set every single page and post canonical link by hand. It’s worth noting that it only works with WordPress 2.9+ and that it only applies to pages and posts and not the rest of your WordPress website.

The best full on method to get clean URL structures is a good combination of setting your Permalinks to Custom Structure: /%postname%/, using a good .htaccess file and canonicalizing links.

So if you don’t like it or you don’t think it works the way you think it should don’t just say that and leave it at that, that helps nobody. Get specific; What does the plugin not do right? What would you like to see the plugin do?

Let’s get the suggestions and questions going in the forum:

http://www.bryanhadaway.com/forum/canonical-link/

Thanks, Bryan