a nice SEO plugin for wordpress

We all know that nicer permalinks are better for search engines. Wordpress gives us a lot of options there. But what good is a nice url if you’re site faces a duplicate content penalty?

How so? Let’s assume you have a post with a permalink like http://www.yourblog.com/my-best-post/. That’s certainly a nice url. But wordpress seems to have the behaviour to also accept an alternative but very similar url: http://www.yourblog.com/my-best-post. If this url is indexed by a search engine, you’ll have 2 urls pointing to the same content. All it takes is someone posting this alternative url somewhere and it will be indexed sooner or later. You might not be banned by google for such a little thing, but why not avoid any risks if you can?

It wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I stumbled upon this plugin while searching for the trailing slash problem. The plugin I’m talking about is called “Permaling Redirect Plugin” and is being developed by Scott Yang. You can find the page here: http://fucoder.com/code/permalink-redirect/. I’m using it on my site and can recommend it to anyone serious about a little SEO.