I was wondering the same thing about duplicate synchronized WP/Discourse content from this topic: https://meta.discourse.org/t/risk-of-duplicate-content-with-synchronized-wp-posts-discourse-topics/91737
But it got closed by Jeff Atwood saying there are already existing topics. I couldn’t find any topics that addressed this question. Please advise.
I searched before posting and I didn’t find any either, a bit confused. Maybe I didn’t use the right keywords?
It’s been brought up a few times, but I don’t think there is a topic dedicated to it. There is a topic on Feverbee that I contributed to: Is it possible for the feverbee blog posts to be pulled in full? - Forum Support - FeverBee Experts. It is possible to set the Canonical URL of a WordPress post so that it matches the Discourse topic. Beyond that, I don’t think there is anything the plugin can do about the duplicate content issue.
Maybe one year later: is there any other solution for the duplicate content issue?
Like add a canonical url in the discourse forum post or no-index the forum post.
Maybe 9 months later: this is something that keeps coming up with us too. We started posting only the excerpt to Discourse, but our members don’t like to be bounced back to the site to read the full article.
Well, you can’t have it both ways, so I’m not sure what you’re proposing here.
My proposal would be to offer some flexibility, so there is a choice of what type of community to make without getting dinged by Google for duplicate content:
The first option would require a canonical url pointing to the blogpost that is not on Discourse. The easiest way to offer this flexibility imho is an option to set the canonical url for a topic.
Yes, this is a thing. Google don’t like duplicate copies of articles.
Your options here seem pretty simple:
Right?
An embed set canonical url site setting was recently added to Discourse. When this setting is enabled, the canonical URL for topics that have an embed URL will be set to the topic’s embed URL. For sites using the WP Discourse plugin, enabling this setting will cause the canonical URL of any posts published from WordPress to be set to the WordPress post’s URL.
This turned out to work great. It was just not obvious to me how to create a topic with a canonical URL. After some experimentation I found out you have to enter the original URL as topic title.
@simon What exactly is an “embed URL”? I’ve also seen the term “embedded topics”. I’m just not sure what these mean.
The embed url is an attribute that can be associated with a topic. The WP Discourse plugin sets the embed url to the permalink of the WP post. So if you use the site setting embed set canonical url the WP post permalink will be the canonical url of the discourse topic (i.e. it will appear in the head as the cannonical link).
Thank you. Is the embed url attribute only settable the API?
Yes, you can only set it via the API. It’s used by various features that involve the importation of content from a 3rd party service.
closed off or deleted? Does embed set canonical url completely solve dup content SEO issue?
Yes it does if used correctly. Please review the above, in particular Simon’s post, and let us know if you have any specific questions or issues.
My use case would be to create discussions in Discourse automatically from wordpress using the Discourse WordPress plugin with the
embed set canonical url option enabled.
Once I connect WordPress to discouse and the new topics are created automatically, is there anything else I have to do besides enable that embed set canonical url option?
Yup, that’s all you need to do.