Wordpress BackupBuddy adding ?doing_wp_cron= in URLS

[TomPryor83]

Hi

Has anyone found WordPress Backup Buddy causing a problem with SEO. I understand why it does it, but wondered if anyone experienced issues with this?

Only sometimes it adds /?doing_wp_cron=****** on to the end of a URL

Thanks

Tom

[ThompsonPaul]

Most welcome Tom. Happy to assist.

P.

[TomPryor83]

Great answer Paul - Thanks for taking the time.

[ThompsonPaul]

This is the same kind of issue you encounter from any system that uses URL parameters to add additional info to a URL, Tom. (For example, even Google Analytics uses additional URL parameters to track incoming campaigns, and those can be indexed as additional URLs.

These extra URLs can cause duplicate content issues, and the first line of defence is to ensure that each of your pages includes a rel=canonical meta tag in its header. As long as the page refers to itself in the rel=canonical, any new URL that just adds parameters will include the canonical tag pointing back to the non-parameter version. (This is a best practice in WordPress anyway, and can be enabled using many of the WordPress SEO plugins.)

As an additional step, you can use Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to manually tell those two search engines to ignore the extra parameters.

Hope that helps?

Paul

P.S. The best solution for this issue is avoid having BackupBuddy need to add those parameters in the first place. They're created by BackupBuddy having to use the alternate cron process, which in turn is only necessary if your host has disabled Loopbacks. If loopbacks are in fact enabled, you can turn off the alternate cron in your wp-config file and the extra URL parameters will no longer be generated.