I’ve never run or hosted my own search engine. I’ve run and hosted web servers, mail servers, proxy servers and caching servers (I’m even contemplating running my own URL shortener), but never a search engine. There was a time when I ran an enterprise instance of Alta Vista back when I coded for a living and was part of the team building Factiva.com, but that doesn’t count.
If I had have run my own search engine I would have known just how important canonical URLs are and that having multiple copies of the same content hosted on different domains would cause search engines to penalise you and loose search engine ranking, fast.
But I’ve never run my own search engine. So I didn’t know any of this. I probably should have, but I didn’t. Mea culpa.
So what has any of this to do with Posterous? I use Posterous. I like Posterous, a lot. I’ve written about Posterous, quite a bit. I also use Posterous to not only post to my Posterous blog but also to my own WordPress powered blog, on a domain I’ve owned for a goodly number of years, via Posterous’s autopost function … and which nicely and neatly produces an exemplar of how to have duplicate content hosted on multiple domains, with multiple URL addressing systems, for each and every post I produce.
How could I have not noticed this? Other people have, including Ian Delaney‘s excellent write up, punnily entitled Past Posterous.
Sadly, it looks like despite the ease of blogging that Posterous offers, there is such a thing as too easy and so for now, with regret, I’ve postponed my use of Posterous, possibly in permanence. Unless of course, they offer a way of specifying canonical URLs.
And with profuse apologies for the overuse of alliteration in this post.
Photo Credit: I Bought a Mac on Flickr.
Written at home (51.427051, -0.333344) and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary
Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.
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