Have you run into this scenario? You have content that needs to live on multiple sites but you are concerned about SEO issues duplicating said content?
As search engines crawl the web looking for pages to include in their search indexes they may run across content duplicated from another site. When that happens the search engine will first attempt to determine which site is the “source of truth”. The site with duplicated content will be penalized in rankings. If no source can be found both sites rankings will be penalized. An SEO nightmare.
Is it possible to distribute the same content to multiple sites without incurring this penalty? The answer is a resounding YES! All you need to do is let the search engine know where the real of the article is, the canonical article. This is done by including a tag in the html head area. It is for search engines, humans do not typically see it.
WordPress has some built in canonical abilities however in WordPress itself there is no way to set the canonical url. I tend to have articles published all over the web that I would like to copy to this site for posterity. Today I whipped up a little plugin that provides a simple url field to add the article’s canonical url in a search engine friendly way.
It is as simple as adding the url as you create the article!
Publish your post and WordPress will handle the rest.
Here is an example post that I wrote on team building for WebDevStudios.
You may notice there is also a brief disclaimer at the top of the article. That is optional and may be helpful to some readers and/or required by the site you are reposting from to comply with guidelines.
If you want to use this plugin on your own site simply head over to Github and download the plugin!
helpful article you shared with knowledgeable info, i would definitely use this method. Thanks for sharing the article.