New Wordpress is even better for SEO

September 28, 2007

Wordpress 2.3 is out, and it is even more Search Engine Friendly than before.

This is due to one particular feature - canonical URLs. Basically, this means that there is now 1 url for each page in your blog rather than the 10 or 20 (in reality there are a lot more than that) that there were before. These are all versions of the same page:

/index.php/////page/2//////////////////////////////?paged=2
/index.php?paged=2
/page/2

There are lots more. So why is this an issue, and why should we care that it is now fixed?

Easy. Same reason as we care about all other forms of canonicalisation - it can confuse the search engines if not looked after properly. You might end up with the same page being indexed with several different urls, you might get different URLs linked to with the same content, and it can end up as a mess, and can only be fixed with some clever use of an .htaccess file. So rather than mucking about with .htaccess files and other such things, it is now dealt with by the standard install of wordpress. Brilliant!

There are few other nifty additions with this version of wordpress:

Tagging of posts is now supported in wordpress core as opposed to a plugin.
Automatic notification of updates to plugins and to wordpress itself. This is gonna be a timesaver for all those who have lots of wordpress plugins, or even those who don’t follow wordpress development and release news.
Obviosuly there are all the usual bug fixes and changes under the hood as well.

So if you are using Wordpress, look into installing the latest version, as it will definately be a time saver!

James
SEO Programmer