Should Canonical URLs be used in Wordpress?

[BradBorst]

Wordpress offers Canonical URLs in the "All in one SEO" settings.  I know that canonical tags for page content will cause the search engine to ignore the content, but I don't understand this setting in Wordpress.  The Canonical URLs box for my blog had been checked until a couple weeks ago.  I unchecked it (removing the canonical tag) and now I have about 300 duplicate content pages acccording to my SEOMoz reports.  It appears that it's just the blog tag in the url now that is causing the confusion.  Here's an example of the same url with two tags:

http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/aclu/

http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/rfid/

Should I activate the canonical URL setting in Wordpress again.  If not, how can I fix this?

Your assistance is greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Brad

[itrogers]

You should probably make sure that the canonical URLs box is checked in that particular plugin. The reason why you are getting those duplicate content errors is because Google is seeing those tag pages as different URLs with the same content which will possibly penalize you.

This will help with most of the issues. Also, you can edit your tag and category archive pages to display links to the different articles without displaying a lot of the content. Although there might be user consideration for this.

Also, maybe try SEO Ultimate, a plugin which has additional options for you regarding your author, date, category, and tags archive pages.

[BradBorst]

That makes sense.  For now, I have just added the canonical tag to the urls.  Thanks so much for your help.

Brad