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All of my affiliate sites held rankings as well as my authority sites. From what I've seen what's worked is:

• Continuously publishing content
• Putting the blog page first (continuously updated)
• Ensuring that Google is aware of my site in Google Webmaster Tools
• So basically building an affiliate site as a "standard" authority site

So no drop in rankings, actually the exact opposite.

Hi Matthew - not that I saw. It appears to be a feature built in and non-configurable. Lot's of indexation options but nothing for canonicals.

Hi everyone,

I'm driving myself insane trying to figure this one out and am hoping someone has more technical chops than I do. Here's the situation...

I'm getting duplicate canonical tags on my pages and posts, one is inside of the WordPress SEO (plugin) commented section, and the other is elsewhere in the header. I am running the latest version of WordPress 3.1.3 and the Genesis framework.

After doing some testing and adding the following filters to my functions.php:

<code>remove_action('wp_head', 'genesis_canonical');
remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');</code>

... what I get is this:

With the plugin active + NO "remove action" - duplicate canonical tags
With the plugin disabled + NO "remove action" - a single canonical tag
With the plugin disabled + A "remove action" - no canonical tag

I have tried using only one of these remove_actions at a time, and then combining them both. Regardless, as long as I have the plugin active I get duplicate canonical tags.

Is this a bug in the plugin, perhaps somehow enabling the canonical functionality of WordPress?

Thanks for your help everyone.

• Robert Dempsey

Hi Brad - it's all about the goals. The strategy that works best for me is one of connecting with people in social media and then getting them out as quickly as possible. Mind you I'm building one-on-one relationships as I'm not going for huge numbers. My customer value is large so a single customer can either directly bring in a lot of business or refer a lot of business to me.

I also do a lot of testing to see which content gets the clicks. Oddly enough (or perhaps not) posts about how best to use Twitter, when spread via Twitter, do very well. Go figure. But it's an indicator to be sure.

As you say it takes time. For me it's well worth it and has gotten me a lot of business for my services.

For my sites I prefer to use user-friendly URLS so they look nice and pretty when a searcher sees them on the Google results. To keep my WordPress installs nice and fast I use a plugin called W3 Total Cache. Any time the server doesn't have to hit the database it will be much faster -this plugin helps with that. I also use another plugin called CSprites (or something like that) to put all images into a sprite file. This combination, plus a dedicated server, keeps my sites serving very fast even with some dynamic widgets on the page.

I'm curious about this too as I get a lot of "direct traffic." I know for a fact that my content is shared via Twitter using a lot of different URL shorteners. I'm guessing (and trying to determine as fact or fiction) that the clicks on the links result in "direct traffic" showing up in Google Analytics. With my domain name - itinerantentrepreneur.com - which I can barely spell most of the time, I seriously doubt people are typing it in by hand And yes, I purchased an alternate domain name and pointed it to my site.

Hi Brad - it's all about the goals. The strategy that works best for me is one of connecting with people in social media and then getting them out as quickly as possible. Mind you I'm building one-on-one relationships as I'm not going for huge numbers. My customer value is large so a single customer can either directly bring in a lot of business or refer a lot of business to me.

I also do a lot of testing to see which content gets the clicks. Oddly enough (or perhaps not) posts about how best to use Twitter, when spread via Twitter, do very well. Go figure. But it's an indicator to be sure.

As you say it takes time. For me it's well worth it and has gotten me a lot of business for my services.

All of my affiliate sites held rankings as well as my authority sites. From what I've seen what's worked is:

• Continuously publishing content
• Putting the blog page first (continuously updated)
• Ensuring that Google is aware of my site in Google Webmaster Tools
• So basically building an affiliate site as a "standard" authority site

So no drop in rankings, actually the exact opposite.