rel=”canonical” – Its official!
Finally some seo development. Big 3 (Google, Yahoo and Live) will soon be using rel=”canonical” tags in order to manage duplicate content on your domain name. The tag will be used in the header of your page next to meta tags. For example <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.seoprix.com/wahtever.php”> will tell search engines that the page is a copy of https://www.seoprix.com/wahtever.php. Fore more uses and information have a look at the original SEOmoz article. I don’t know when but I’m sure there will be a way to exploit this little tag soon.
It has recently been proven that duplicate content penalty only exists when the content is being duplicated on the same domain. Could this be an attempt to help webmasters sort this out? rel=”canonical” tag is said to replace 301 redirects which will make things much easier. Not only that, rel=”canonical” is only there for the spiders which means that the duplicate page will still be there for your visitors and won’t redirect to the original. Meanwhile, we just have to wait and see.
