Ethical SEO company - Web Designer - Emarketing Consultant - Connecticut: NYC : New Jersey

Last week, Google, Yahoo and MSN collectively announced a new custom tag for HTML called the Canonical Tag. Its purpose to is to help those webmasters concerned with duplicate content guide the search engines to the page that should be cached.

This tag can be inserted into the HEAD section of a web page.

It would work like this.

Say your ecommerce or CMS site generates two URLS for one content item:

/index.php?mycontent

and

/index.php?mycontent_sessionID=123456789

In these URLS the content is the same, but the two different URLS will result in a duplicate content penalty.

Now, with the Canonical tag, you could tell Google, via the public source code, which URL should be added to their index.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/index.php?mycontent” />

Walla! Google will ignore /index.php?mycontent_sessionID=123456789, and pay attention to /index.php?mycontent.

*Note, the same thing could have been similarly achieved with a NoIndex, follow tag, or a programmatic 301 redirect.

Now, the problem problem I see with implementing this tag are:

1) Unless a user has access to root files and programming code, they cannot effectively implement this tag. For example. Say a small business owner has a ecommerce site where a session ID might be generate as in the example above. It is fairly unlikely they will have enough skill or knowledge to implement the code to dynamically insert the canonical tag in the session ID page.

3) If they did have enough knowledge and skill to implement the canonical tag into their programming source code, then they should be knowledgeable enough to create a structure that does NOT generate duplicate content in the first place.

Whether this tag ultimately becomes useful or not, I do find it interesting that the big 3 have cooperated on the use this tag.