[wp-hackers] Canonical integration into core

[Joost de Valk]

On Feb 18, 2009, at 2:07 PM, Lynne Pope wrote:

> There is no need to add meta data tags to handle this situation.
> Search engines that respect robots.txt all honour this, and have  
> done for
> years. I use pretty permalinks and none of my /permalink?anything is
> indexed. This also prevents indexing of search pages (which  
> strangely enough
> do get linked to). Depending on how the site uses these non-standard  
> URL's
> though there can be a loss of link juice by blocking them at robots  
> level.
>
> Disallow: /*?*
> Disallow: /*?
>

Lynne,

you don't get it, I'm afraid. When you're blocking those pages from  
being indexed, you're also blocking the search engines from allowing  
those links to help your rankings. If you use the rel=canonical, you  
allow them to index it, and they use the links toward that "faulty"  
URL to improve the rankings of the page you set as canonical (provided  
they have (almost) the same content).

Best,
Joost