Featured Content Gallery, category links & duplicate content
 

Hi,

i'm building a site where i want to minimize to use of duplicate content as much as possible, and to avoid possible penalties by the SE's (so avoiding the same post under date archives, tags, categories). I stripped it quite a lot, but still have a problem with the Featured Content Gallery (FCG).

An example : my post (post1.html) on the FCG has two categories, Featured and Cat1. I can access this post also through the dropdown menu or the sidebar (category widget), where it's URL is : domain.com/cat1/post1.html

when i access this same post through the FCG the url is : domain.com/featured/post1.html

This is not what i want, i want to change the FCG url to the other 'main' category URL , so the FCG url will be like this : domain.com/cat1/post1.html - (my posts has a max. of 2 categories, if necessary featured and it's main one)

any advice how to change this ? tia :)

Re: Featured Content Gallery, category links & duplicate content
 

Wow, I am not nearly to that point for SEO... Probably the 'official' way to do this would be to manipulate the plugin itself, and I'm sure someone more familar with the inner workings may post, but before you do, there is a simpler way... :idea: FCG seems to pull the link for the article from the lowest number category the post is in. So, for your example, 'featured' is cat#2 in the WP database, but 'Cat1' is cat#3 in the database... so it pulls 'featured'. If you were to change it so your post was in 'featured' and 'whatever corresponds to cat#1 in the database', it will set the link up for the latter. I guess it would work best if you have all of the categories you are going to establish lined up, and you can just put 'featured' at the end. A pain if you add new categories constantly (rename slugs to keep articles in the same place to not get dinged from SE's), but it keeps it simple. Of course, I don't think it would be too hard correct FCG to recognize the 'highest' number, and then you would just need to make 'featured' first.... but again, that's for someone who likes tinkering with the plugin itself to add. (I don't because customizations like that are always overridden at updates)

Re: Featured Content Gallery, category links & duplicate content
 

thanks for your input... this works indeed, the only problem is as you mentioned when adding new categories... It made me think about changing the featured category id to a very high number like '9999' with some Mysql commands (i saw somewhere on Google how to do this), the only thing I'm afraid of is a new categories' id created after 'features' will be 10.000, a thing i have to test.. i'll let you know the results, thanks again for your reply !

Re: Featured Content Gallery, category links & duplicate content
 

update on my post above, i changed the featured category id to '999' with MySQL, but after creating a new category it get's the id '1000' so this isnt working :(

i just hope this can be changed in a future version of FCG... If anyone has a solution for this please post here, thanks !