On my WordPress site CapeParrot.org I have a number of pages created by plugins: a forum, a picture gallery and a store. To use these Plugins you just place a shortcode on a single WordPress page and they do their magic to create tons of pages on that one page. The problem I’ve been having is that Google and the other search engines only see the one page that I put the shortcode on. My forum for example has hundreds of pages and is growing every day with new unique content. None of which other than the main page is being indexed by the search engines.
I just learned about Canonical Links. They are a nifty new tag created by Google to avoid duplicate content. Google is going out of their way to remove spammy duplicate content. Good for them. Used correctly they are great. The problem is that WordPress will place the same Canonical link on every page a plugin creates because WordPress sees every page as being the same as the one you put the shortcode on. Every page on my Cape Parrot forum carries the canonical link: http://www.capeparrot.org/wordpress/forum/ which tells Google that every page in my forum is basically duplicate content and to only look at the main page.
My current solution is to remove the Canonical link statement from all my WordPress pages. I did so by adding the following code to my functions.php file:
remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');
In your WordPress Dashboard select Appearance/Editor then click on the functions.php file and paste the above code in. After doing so go to your site and view the source, you will see that the: <link rel='canonical' line is gone.
You still need to avoid duplicate content. Doing it on the server side with redirects is probably the better method.
