WordPress Plugins to Tweak Canonical Links

I became a bona fide WordPress plugin author yesterday, with the release of two extremely basic plugins that tweak how canonical links are managed by WordPress:

• Homepage Canonical Link – Adds a canonical link to your blog’s home page, which the current WordPress does not do.
• Remove Default Canonical Links – Disables WordPress’ default generation of canonical links. Useful if you’re generating your canonical links through other means

Both are intended for WordPress 2.9 and above and have been tested for 3.0. They’re also linked from my new WordPress Projects page.

If you’re not up to speed on canonical links, they help search engines figure out the official URL of a given page, to avoid duplicate content being indexed when query string data might otherwise create multiple URLs to the same page. Setting the canonical links helps with search engine optimization. More details can be found from Matt Cutts at Google on the topic.

They total about 6 lines of actual code, but it was a good way to learn the basics of plugin development and the submission process to the WordPress plugin directory. Thanks go out to Bryan Hadaway (author of his own Canonical Link plugin), who vetted my work and provided the encouragement to submit it. Have a look at his post on getting started with WordPress plugin development or  the official guide to writing a plugin at the WordPress Codex for in depth information.