Over a year ago, Google, Yahoo and Bing made the announcement that they would support the canonical tag in order to help webmaster who published content from being overrun and beaten out in the SERPs by scrapers, or appearing to have duplicate content. Google said:
Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: 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. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.
Yahoo chimed in:
Avoiding duplicates in the search engine index has consistently been a key concern we’ve heard from webmasters and site owners. Over the last few years, we have made significant strides in finding duplicates in our crawler and index algorithmically and provided webmasters with better tools for controlling these. Today we are announcing our support for a new HTML tag, the <link> tag, which helps reduce duplicates by documenting the preferred URL form to access each page.
And Bing followed suit:
Live Search has partnered with Google and Yahoo to support a new tag attribute that will help webmasters identify the single authoritative (or canonical) URL for a given page. The link tag defines a relationship between a document and an external resource. In this case, that resource is the canonical URL.
Google, however, was the only engine that did support it – until now. Bing and Yahoo are finally getting with the program, as announced at SMX.
SEO content is imperative to webmasters, but correct tagging is part of that process. If you have a reputable SEO or firm handing your SEO content writing, you can rest assured that your content will be accurately tagged and duplicate content will not be an issue.
Google announced cross domain support for the canonical tag last October, and Yahoo and Bing faling in line will help make this a very good thing for webmasters of all levels by changing the duplicate content problem into just another challenge easily overcome by those in the know.
Matt Cutts explains the canonical tag in this video: Canonical Tag Explained
Matt Cutts, free image from Wikipedia
Tags: Canonical Tag, Matt Cutts