Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have added support for the new Canonical Link element to help identify a link to content on your site where all traffic should land when more than one link exists to the same content. The Canonical Link will be used for the search engine index, and sitemap URLs will still be used when there is a tie between more than one URL link.

Wordpress 2.9 has now integrated the rel="canonical" link element, which will display between the "head" tags, but only on single post pages:

Note: Wordpress itself does not actually integrate the wp.me short url format in the core. The Stats plugin, version 1.6 or above, is required for the wp.me short url format to be integrated.

Drupal has not added core support for the rel="canonical" link element, so Yoast has created a module that will add this feature to Drupal.

If you’re using Wordpress, as NG does, then you will want to have the rel="canonical" link element on all the pages of you’re blog such as the homepage, tag, content, and other pages of your blog, so that each page can tell the search engines which link to use for all similar content that might otherwise be labeled as duplicate content. For instance, if you use the Google analytics campaign tag for traffic coming from Twitter your link might look like:

For this page the Canonical link should be:

To make sure all your pages tell the search engine which link to use you’ll need a plugin to help with this SEO (search engine optimization). Here at NerdGrind we use the a Wordpress plugin called All in One SEO Pack, which has included Canonical URLs for a while. The All in One SEO Pack is highly recommended.

The addition of Canonical Links can significantly improve the SEO of your blog, and this can result in more traffic, as well as higher quality traffic. Below is a video on Canonical Links, and a few links to more resources on this very important topic.

Specify your canonical
Handling legitimate cross-domain content duplication
Demystifying the duplicate content penalty

Matt Cutts explains the Canonical Link element in the video below:

Wordpress 2.8.5 is a security hardening release. Some of the notable changes are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

If you aren’t seeing an upgrade banner message at the top of your Wordpress Admin dashboard, go to Tools -> Upgrade to trigger the cron job upgrade manually.

To upgrade Wordpress in two steps without having to disable plugins, or if automatic upgrade fails, click here. If you’ve never been able to use automatic upgrade due to errors you could never explain click here.

YOURLS is a URL shortening service you can run on your own server, and it comes with a Wordpress plugin called YOURLS Wordpress to Twitter. In the past I’ve used WP to Twitter, but since it doesn’t support YOURLS I’ve had to switch.

I’ve asked the author of YOURLS Wordpress to Twitter to add Google Analytics Campaign Tracking Code with a custom field for authors to add their own identifier, but he has been too busy updating the YOURLS scripts, so I’ve hacked the plugin code to allow us to use Campaign Tracking now.

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Today YOURLS 1.4 was released, but the database upgrade script created some errors for some people, dead links, and the stats are not working. We can fix all that. Be sure to logout of the old version you will be upgrading from before starting the upgrade, or you might see the Install YOURLS page and link, rather than the Upgrade YOURLS page and link. First lets go over the changes in the config.php file.

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Most people use URL shortening services like Bit.ly, TinyURL, Awe.sm, Su.pr, and the list goes on. There has been a lot of concern over the long term stability of these services, since they aren’t profitable business models, so they can’t be relied on over the long haul. One popular service, Cli.gs announced it will shutdown on October 25. Tr.im sudently shutdown, and then reopened just as suddenly, so it’s hard to trust short URL services. One effort will be to provide an independent directory service for URL mappings through 301works.org, but that isn’t going to solve the problem of reliability.

Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to do it yourself. I’m talking about setting up your own URL shortening service using YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener, which is a set of PHP scripts written by Lester Chan and Ozh Richard. Let’s go through what YOURLS offers and how to set it up.

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