The good folks over at Google, Yahoo! and MSN have all recently introduced a new method for website owners to avoid duplicate content issues, which can result in penalties against your site, and hurt your search traffic. You can now use a Canonical URL Link to tell the search engines which URL you want them to index for a particular page on your site.
The tag looks like this, . Using a canonical tag provides a solution if you run a website where several different URLs link to either the same page, or pages with very similar content.
Of particular interest is the potential for this tag as a solution for websites that use session IDs. Session IDs, since I've been in the Internet marketing industry, have been the bane of SEO practitioners everywhere. Because the URL changes each time someone visits the site, it becomes difficult for search engines to index your website's pages (not to mention the difficulty in creating links to interior pages). Using the canonical tag makes it much easier to filter URL variations into one simpler URL string.
For more information, check out the post at Google Webmaster Central.
Photo by Shoschie
The good folks over at Google, Yahoo! and MSN have all recently introduced a new method for website owners to avoid duplicate content issues, which can result in penalties against your site, and hurt your search traffic. You can now use a Canonical URL Link to tell the search engines which URL you want them to index for a particular page on your site.
The tag looks like this, 