In a rare show of collaboration Google, Microsoft and Yahoo made a joint announcement on Thursday that that they would support a new Web standard that will allow millions of Web publishers to remove duplicate pages from their Web sites.

“There is a lot of clutter on the Web and with this, publishers will be able to clean up a lot of junk,” said Matt Cutts, an engineer who heads Google’s spam fighting efforts. “I think it is going to gain traction pretty quickly.”

“We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation,” said Nathan Buggia, a lead program manager at Microsoft. “This is a clear benefit for publishers as it gives them an opportunity to get more exposure through search engines.”

Google Webmaster Central:

Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

That’s great news for anyone out there looking for that extra bit of juice to drive some more traffic to your site and fortunately, if you’re using WordPress to publish your site, it’s pretty simple to add this functionality.

Specifying your canonical in WordPress

Add this snippet of code to your functions.php file in your theme.

function set_canonical() {
  if ( is_single() ) {
    global $wp_query;
    echo '
';
  }
}
add_action('wp_head', 'set_canonical');

Once this is up, the canonical link will be on every version of your post page telling bots that the preferred version of the page is the permalink version.

If you want to check and make sure it’s there you can view your page source and look for the link rel right before your closing head tags. But remember, this is only going to show up on your inside pages. i.e. your single post pages.

link rel="canonical" href="http://jamespoling.com/2009/02/how-to-specify-your-canonical-to-avoid-duplicate-content-in-wordpress/"/

Enjoy!

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