I am not big on SEO myself but my colleague assures me that as both the blog post and the forum topic have unique and canonical urls then there is no problem. And I am sure he will correct me if I am wrong or add a comment if needed!

On the date issue that is a jolly good question. Blog Linking taps into our standard post class to create the topic/post data so you are right to assume that it is stamped with the current date/time as would be normal. The date/time CAN be edited but it does mean editing the resultant topic post which is not, I appreciate, ideal.

Having said that, if you are familiar with WP style action filters then it should be possible to override the normal date/time stamp at save time. I would need to experiment to check on this but the filters are all in place and as long as the blog post POST data is still available it can be done. And that is pretty easy to accomplish.

yes, there can be duplicate content… if worried about that, should use the blog linking canonical url setting and have one linked to the other…

Thanks guys. I guess I needed that “canonical” keyword to go looking for what I needed to know. Currently I have the option “Blog post and linked topic have their own canonical URL” selected. So my understanding both will be indexed individually as separate content.. This sounds good to me, and the page content shouldn’t be exactly the same anyhow now that I understand how Google treats pages with canonical URLs.

@yellow-swordfish I’m not familiar with the action filters, but will do some testing with new backdated posts and let you know how I go..

no, actually the opposite…  possibly…  😉  since they have their own distinct, canonical url, its possible the google or other will think they are duplicate content.. depends on your site, what else is on the page (ie sidebar, footer, comments matching posts), etc… 

if you picked one of the other options (canonical to only blog post or forum post), there would be no chance for duplicate content… normally, distinct should work fine, but we offer the options in case a search engine believes you have duplicate content…

Okay, thanks for the clarification. I will think about this.

One more thing, I tried a new post with an older publish date and it doesn’t backdate the thread. This isn’t really a problem I’m going to bother following up at the moment, though I have a question about the time showing for how long ago a post was made. 

These are the two posts I’ve made in the past hour:

I’m not sure why it’s showing a negative number here for the time it was posted, though it does equate to about 10 hours ago in seconds. My WordPress site, and the forum are set to the same timezone UTC+10.. 

Stop using UTC values is the answer. PHP doesn’t do a good job with UTC support and WP – wrongly in our opinion – only includes it for backward compatibility.

You need this FAQ (https://simple-press.com/documentation/codex/faq/troubleshooting/why-do-my-new-posts-show-as-posted-minus-seconds-ago/) which explains how to deal with it and correct things.

I’ve checked the WordPress settings and it’s set to UTC+10 but can’t find the section to set the timezone in SP… The instructions on that page aren’t clear on exactly where the time needs to be set..does that documentation need updating? The only thing I could see related to time was this option that is stating “Unknown” 

Change your wordpress setting to Brisbane from utc +10 , each member can then set their own timezone under their profile settings on the forum, it is under options>display options

Thanks kvr28 🙂

Excellent, thanks for the help guys. Got it sorted. I didn’t realise the list had places as well as the UTC times on it in the WP settings, and the FAQ page made me think the settings were in SP options too. 

Glad you’re all fixed up!