On May 30 2009 the head of the Google anti Spam squad Matt Cutts gave a valuable and definitive presentation on the right ways to use WordPress. You might want to take notes. Trust me it will be worth you time.

You can browse the slides at

You can also download the talk in PowerPoint format.

I have been recently getting to grips with the importance of sticking to a single domain for your blog site. Mainly via three  leading SEO experts  (Dan Thies, Matt Cutts of Google and Jerry West) who are all currently saying the same thing about this, so I thought I would do a brief post about this SEO issue.

Choose your root domain and stick to it.  Use it consistently in all of your linkning both on and off site.  It does not matter if you choose www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com (without the www) you must just be consistent.  Search engines treat the two sites as different sites and therefore you have various issues when trying to rank your site for a keyword phrase.  If you think about it each version of a site is in effect competing with the other.  I made this mistake on a site some time ago and whilst I had told Google via the webmaster tools that I wanted the site to be indexed as mydomain.com I had not told Yahoo and as a result I had a result in Yahoo for both www.mydomain and mydomain and they were different rankings.  Very irritating.

This rule extends to all inbound or on-site links.  They must always link to your preferred domain.  Earlier this year the major search engines agreed to follow a canonical tag which allows you to sort out those sites that do not link to you correctly.  You can use this simply by adding

<link rel="canonical" href="http://yourdomain.com/" />

to your site. In fact if you are using the All in One SEO Pack plug-in for WordPress, as soon as you activate it, this link tag is added to your pages.

Technorati Tags: canonical link tag, use one domain, www or not