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Google: Specify your canonicals

D

djbaxter

Guest
Specify your canonical
by Joachim Kupke, Senior Software Engineer, and Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead, Google Webmaster Central Blog
Thursday, February 12, 2009

we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. Now, you can simply add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version:

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

inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs (remove space after opening "<")... and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.
Click to expand...

...more
 
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Top 3 Search Engines Unite on Canonical URL

Top 3 Search Engines Unite on Canonical URL
by Arnold Zafra
February 12th, 2009

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft join hands in the drive to clean up the web of duplicate contents. The top three search engines are implementing support for the new HTML tag - "link" .

The new link tag defines the relationship between a document and an external resource that results to the site’s canonical or preferred URL form that would encompass all the sub-domains and variations of a website. The link tag will tell search engine crawlers which canonical URL form it will use when retrieving search results. The link tag also puts the Canonical URL for at the forefront of the website content which will be used for accessing the page, regardless of the session id, link parameter, sort parameter, parameter order of the URL form.
Click to expand...

...more
 
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rel=canonical" - New Google Attribute

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
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Google's Canonical Tag

Just checking that, for the most part at least, this change won't really affect the majority of websites.

Google, along with Yahoo and Microsoft, have been working together to clean up duplicate content, and a tag has been revealed that can give web pages the URL format that they all prefer.

It looks as if where a site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results.

I don't see there's much to answer here. Any thoughts?
 
It's not just duplicate content. It's also duplicate URLs to the same content.

I think people worry way too much about the issue of duplicate URLs, frankly. However someone gets to one of your pages, the important thing is that they get there and then it's up to you to keep them there.

Nevertheless, since Google, MSN, and Yahoo are now offering a very easy way to eradicate the issue, there's nothing to lose by taking advantage of it.
 
Carpe diem: not much of a momentary pleasure

Yes, I've read Google's page on it, carpe diem (used as an admonition to seize the pleasures of the moment without concern for the future) is a mighty strange opening to information on duplicate content), and also Matt Cutts and yes, perhaps useful for large sites, but still it doesn't address duplicate content exactly; just a mild clean-up and one where the onus is placed on webmasters rather than the engines themselves, it seems.
 
v9designbuild said:
but still it doesn't address duplicate content exactly; just a mild clean-up and one where the onus is placed on webmasters rather than the engines themselves, it seems.
Click to expand...

As I said above, the whole issue of duplicate content has been highly overblown by certain SEO "experts" and companies who market software "solutions" to this "problem", which really is a non-problem.

First, modern search engines do a pretty good job (although certainly not perfect) of filtering duplicate content. Note the emphasis on the word filtering: This is NOT a penalty, as is often claimed. There is no "duplicate content penalty". What happens is Google (and MSN, Yahoo, etc.) identify one of the duplicates as the original, based on factors such as age/publication date and site authority, and deindexes the ones it considers to be duplicates. In most cases, the webmaster has little or nothing to worry about.

If you're worried that Google may choose the wrong page or URL as the original, webmasters have always had other recourses to prevent indexing of certain pages or URLs, e.g., blocking specific URLs in the robots.txt file, use of noindex and nofollow directives, etc. The recent announcement is just one more way of accomplishing this.

And if by chance you do find that more than one URL is included in (indexed by) Google or the other search engines, what damage has been done? The main thing is to get searchers to find your pages. Does it really matter how they do that?
 
I'm still not clear as to where to add the canonical code. If I publish an article, say in HubPages, how and where do I add this canonical code?
 
It goes anywhere in your head tags for the page.

I'm not sure what HubPages[SUP]1[/SUP] is exactly but for an HTML page look for:

Code: 
< html>
< head>
{insert the tag anywhere after "head" and before "/head"}
< /head>
< body>
< /body>
< /html>
(spaces after "<" added so it will display)


[SUP]1[/SUP] Added: I just checked out HubPages. Since your article is being published on another site, you probably cannot add tags like this. Contact HubPages for further information.
 
Canonical Tags to Solve Duplicate Content Issue

Have you heard about the 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, uniting to solve the issue of duplicate contents.

What they offer now is "canonical tags". This will work for large websites or blogs and within one domain only.
 
There is another option within Google webmaster tool where you can specify urls which you want to remove from Google index.

I am sure it will help too.
 

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