Microsoft, Yahoo and Google announce "Canonical Tag" initiative - Net.Matters - February 2009

It's not often that we hear that the Big 3 Search Engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have joined forces to agree on a specific internet strategy.  However, all widely accept that something had to be done to reduce the huge amount of duplicate content found on the Web.

Without delving too deeply into the technical aspects of the initiative announced this month, we will attempt to explain what Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have agreed upon.

When we search on key terms, we only want to see the original version contained within the search results - but too often, search engines find multiple URLs relating to the same page of a site so will display all the results.  For websearchers, we then need to search through the clutter.  For website owners, this is a headache, since duplicate content devalues page rankings and dilutes the impact on search results pages. 

In an attempt to help search engines and users alike, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have announced that they will be using a new canonical tag, enabling webmasters to specify the main URL that search engines should use for indexing and therefore be pointing to. 

For example, by specifying the canonical tag in the head section of the page...

<linkrel="canonical"href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

...webmasters can give search engines a strong hint about which is the main URL for their site.

In an article by Victoria Fox, posted on www.searchengineland.com she concludes that: "This new tag won't completely solve duplicate issues on the web, but it should help make things quite a bit easier particularly for ecommerce sites, who likely need all the help they can get in the current economic conditions.  Site owners have been asking for help with these issues for a really long time so this should be a greatly welcomed addition."

Click on any of these to read the Big 3's blogs on the Canonical Tag

  Google

  Yahoo

  Microsoft