[Offtopic] Canonical tag announced

Fri Feb 20 06:20:54 EST 2009

Canonical Tag Announced

By Chris Crum - Wed, 02/18/2009 - 17:52 
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/02/18/canonical-tag-announced-
googles-matt-cutts-interviewed

Eric Schmidt once famously (or infamously, depending on how you look at 
it) called the Internet a cesspool. 

Now Google along with search rivals Yahoo and Microsoft are working 
together to clean up that cesspool to some extent. 

Much of this "cesspool" comes from duplicate content, and a tag has now 
been revealed jointly from the three search engine giants that can give 
your pages the URL format that they all prefer. 

This is called the Canonical Tag and looks like this:

As Google explains:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-
canonical.html

you can simply add this tag to specify your preferred version of a URL 
inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-
fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

and the search engines will understand that the duplicates all refer to 
the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. 

Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are 
transferred as well. 

If you have unanswered questions about the canonical tag, now is the time 
to ask. Google will be happy to answer them. Yahoo and Microsoft have 
additional posts about the tag:

http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-adding-more-arrows-
to-your-quiver/

and

http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-
solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx

--

Cheers,
Stephen