For the upcoming Digging into WordPress update for WordPress 3.0, I have been working with WordPress’ multisite functionality. Prior to version 3.0, WordPress came in two flavors: “original” and “multisite” (MU). Most designers probably work with regular, one-blog installations of “regular” WordPress. The htaccess rules for all single-blog installations of WordPress haven’t changed. They are the same for WordPress 3.0 as they are for all previous versions.
But now that multisite has merged with regular-flavored WordPress, we can stick with single-blog installs (which is how things are setup by default), or we can activate multisite functionality and create an unlimited network of sites. The process is still new and there are bugs that need to be worked out, but eventually it will be a widely used WordPress feature. That said, the htaccess rules used for WordPress Multisite may change as the software continues to evolve.
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Jeff Morris recently demonstrated a potential issue with the way WordPress handles multipaged posts and comments. The issue involves WordPress’ inability to discern between multipaged posts and comments that actually exist and those that do not. By redirecting requests for nonexistent numbered pages to the original post, WordPress creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for your site. In this article, we explain the issue, discuss the implications, and provide an easy, working solution.
Understanding the “infinite duplicate content” issue
Using the <!--nextpage--> tag, WordPress makes it easy to split your post content into multiple pages, and also makes it easy to paginate the display of your comment threads. For both paged posts and paged comments, WordPress appends the page number to the permalink. So for example, if we have a post split into 3 pages, WordPress will generate the following set of completely valid permalinks (based on name-only permalink structure):
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Canonical URLs are important for maintaining consistent linkage, reducing duplicate content issues, and increasing the overall integrity of your site. In addition to cleaning up trailing slashes and removing extraneous index.php and index.html strings, removing the www subdirectory prefix is an excellent way to shorten links and deliver consistent, canonical URLs.
Of course, an optimal way of removing (or adding) the www prefix is accomplished via HTAccess canonicalization:
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