The three big search engines, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have agreed on a new HTML tag to help to deal with duplicate content. The new tag <link> shall used to mark which URL the search engines shall select for index, and in that way filter out other different variations.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have signed up around the new meta tag <link> in order to try to solve the problem of duplicate content and has already begun working to bring in the new meta tag in their search algorithms. The problem of duplicated content has been a little bit of the SEO nerds’ big hearts question and now it looks as if the problem can be, anyway to some extent, resolved with the new HTML tag.
The new meta tag <link> put a relationship between a page and its canonical link, or the link that is preferred if we should take it in plain English so that other links that may occur with the same content not indexed. This means that the dynamic pages for example, so can you avoid that the search engines index all the paths that have session ID and different parameters so that it only be one page that is indexed. The advantage of this, is that it not going to be so many variations of the same content as duplicate content, usually give worse impact of search engines.
To implement Canonical URL form on you website, you just need to add the following link tag at head section of the site’s HTML.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/products” />
By adding the link tag, the search engine crawlers will disregard the following URL variants but have the same contents as the identified Canonical URL form:
http://www.example.com/products?trackingid=feed
http://www.example.com/products?sessionid=hgjkeor2
http://www.example.com/products?printable=yes&trackingid=footer
An interesting new Meta tag in other words. It will be interesting to follow to see the effects this has in terms of duplicate content and SEO.