How to: Specify your canonical to avoid duplicate content in WordPress

Yahoo, Microsoft and GoogleIn 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.
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After a Decade of Mulling it Over, Yahoo Decides to Crack Down on Spam

yahoo-logoYahoo has finally decided that at least one thing there should work right in their company and I guess they’re focusing on their spam filters.  It’s no secret that Hotmail and Yahoo have a pretty bad track record when it comes to keeping spam out of your inbox.

Gmail uses its own Google technology to keep spam out and it works great.  It definitely leaps and bounds better than what Yahoo and Hotmail have been using and they’ve both been around for more than twice as long as Gmail.

Yahoo is now trying to change that perception. Mark Risher, Yahoo’s “anti-spam czar,” posted on the Yahoo Mail blog on Tuesday. He described some of the efforts being used to cut down on spam:

One way we’re turning up the heat on the spammers is by utilizing even more state-of-the-art technology. Recently, Yahoo!’s anti-spam team has been using a “supercomputer” consisting of thousands of individual PCs — part of our open source Hadoop project — to help detect spammers. We’re teamed up with several top universities on this research, looking for more ways to find and block the bad guys even faster, before they can do their damage.

We’re also out there working with partners big and small to help reduce spam across the Internet. We’ve seen some promising early results from one such company, a startup named Abaca, and our hopes are high that together we can block even more of these messages by looking at spammers’ behavior in addition to the contents of their spammy messages.

Closely related to all of this is that we need to ensure the right messages still get through, that we don’t throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. With the help of our friends at Return Path, we’re relaunching our Complaint Feedback Loop for commercial e-mail companies.

Maybe next Yahoo will follow Gmail’s lead and finally provide free mail forwarding and multiple email account handling via one account for people who either want to use a different primary webmail app or at least manage multiple accounts from their primary Yahoo account.

Jerry Yang to Step Down as Yahoo CEO

jerry_yang

If you haven’t already, you may want to start buying Yahoo stock first thing in the morning.  Yahoo’s stock is bound to see at least a modest bump from this news.

Jerry Yang took over as CEO of Yahoo in June of 2007.  In September, Business Week lauded him as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web, calling him “The Rescuer“.  Barely over a year later Yahoo is a shell of the company it was when Yang took the helm. 

Since he has taken over Yahoo has lost tens of billions of dollars in market cap while watching thousands of its employees (and hundreds of executives) leave the company in a mass exodus.  Good call Businessweek!

“Over the past year and a half, despite extraordinary challenges and distractions, Jerry Yang has led the repositioning of Yahoo! on an open platform model as well as the improved alignment of costs and revenues,” said Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock. “Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level. We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo! as a key executive and member of the Board.” 

“From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensible to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise,” said Yang. “When the Board asked me to become CEO and lead the transformation of the Company, I did so because it was important to re-envision the business for a different era to drive more effective growth. Having set Yahoo! on a new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO role and our global talent to a new leader. I will continue to focus on global strategy and to do everything I can to help Yahoo! realize its full potential and enhance its leading culture of technology and product excellence and innovation.” 

MySpace is the new #1 Site on the Web

Hitwise is reporting that for the first time ever this week MySpace.com beat out Yahoo Mail as well as Yahoo and Google’s homepages for the most unique visits.

MySpace accounted for 4.46% of all U.S. internet visits for the week ending July 8. They also captured 80% of all visits to a social networking site (up from 76%) and surprisingly enough MySpace also accounted for 99.97% of all scantily clad underage girls on the internet.