Google (along with Microsoft and Yahoo, it seems) have just announced they now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If you have multiple pages that have similar content you can now let Google know which is the one you wish them to index.
Direct link to Webmaster Central Blog
The idea is a new <link> tag that specifies the preferred version of a page inside the <head> tags, as follows:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.thinksynergy.co.uk/2009/02/11/twitter/”/>
At first glance I was wondering what all the fuss is about, as to be honest most of us have done a reasonable job of cutting out the duplicate content in our blogs anyway. Once thing I overlooked was the use of Google analytics campaigns (along with any other campaigns). This could lead to your URL being tagged (and indexed) as:
http://www.thinksynergy.co.uk/2009/02/11/twitter/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter
There are two issues with this. The first is that the above indexed URL could be (to what extent, only Google can answer) penalised as duplicate content. Secondly, if it is not being penalised, it is certainly attracting the PageRank that should be aimed at the “official” page.
By using the canonical tag the tagged URL will now tell Google the preferred version of itself, thus putting the PageRank where it should be and avoiding any possibility of being kicked in the backside for duplicate content.
This is a subject that has been discussed a few times on Nice2all, as WordPress seems a hot bed of duplicate content and it is a challenge to cut out as much of it as possible. I imagine with this new method it will be possible to put this issue to bed once and for all, although I haven’t had time to test it out just yet.
I am a bit cynical of the effect of duplicate content, I actually think Google deals with it quite well and people are not punished as much as they may think, but this is a very easy tag to implement and whatever we can do to make the search engines job easier the better in terms of reward, I guess.
Stumble it!
February 13th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I am not too fond of such inventions. Google invented nofollow to fight spam and it ended up as tool to police purchased links and screwing natural linking for the sake of SEO.
As one of my readers said to me in GTalk last night – next month will be all about people trying to exploit this new toy.
February 13th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
@Rarst: Wow, I have found someone more cynical than me
You do make a good point though, will be interesting to see how it goes. I think the self-hosted affiliate links will be the first to be affected.
February 13th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
@Jim
You should visit my blog more often, cynism is my specialty.
February 15th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
This stuff is all new to me. I will go and find out more. I have to agree with Rarst, I too do not enjoy it when the big guys try to force the rest of us into a certain direction. This is interesting, none the less.
February 15th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
@Lyndi: You’re right, and the jury is still out on this subject for me too. In one way it is useful to be able to just tell google that there is duplicate content, rather than worrying about removing it all, but on the other hand it is open to abuse.
I guess this may be a subject to re-visit in a few months
July 3rd, 2011 at 12:16 am
one of the uses of the canonical tag is to insert it in every post you make. That way if your content gets scraped, your site will always get the credit.