[shennon]

Hey Guys,

Google has recently released a new type of <link> attribute. It's the rel="canonical" attribute. This attribute is used to specify a preferred domain, so that Google bots don't penalize you for duplicate content.

This is very useful for dynamic sites and forums.

Read more here: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

[jamesfoster]

A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.
It's common for a site to have several pages listing the same set of products. For example, one page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating.

[bobwilson37]

Yeah, i heard some where about this..But i does not got any stuff related to it, but you have explained it very clearly...Thanks for doing so...

hire seo expert

[thomas009]

Hi,

It's really a great attribute to short out dynamic urls issue.

Well, I also read that Yahoo and MSN are also supporting this new attribute.

[Dan Schulz]

Frankly, I think it's a lazy cop-out for the most part; however it can be useful to people who purchase third party scripts that were written without search optimization in mind (either due to ignorance or more likely knowledge).

WordPress, I'm looking at you.

[Admin]

Originally Posted by Dan Schulz

Frankly, I think it's a lazy cop-out for the most part;

So do i one moment Google says "We do an excellent job of detecting duplicate content and solving canonical URL's" to now.. Oh, i think we need some help here so how about a tag everyone needs to manually add to their pages so we can work it out.

The rel="canonical" attribute is really just a band-aid in my eyes, there's far better ways to solve canonical issues. There's rewrites, nofollow, noindex/nocache, robots.txt etc already.

Although yes, i guess it can be helpful to some people however i don't see myself ever using it.

[Dan Schulz]

A band-aid yes, and a bad one at that. However, I do feel that novices and those stuck using third-party scripts that are hard to update without breaking the core functionality (like many ecommerce scripts from what I've heard) may find it useful as a temporary "fix" until a permanent solution (like you know, firing the programmer and replacing him/her with someone who knows what they're doing) can be found.

[curadebt.com]

Thanks! for sharing this great information.