Specifying canonical links on duplicate content pages
Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google recently announced a new <link> tag to allow Webmasters to specify, for similar content pages, which one is canonical or authoritative page. The tag works as follows:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com”/> is added into the <head> section of all pages for which http://mysite.com is the canonical page. This ensures that the duplicate pages, annotated with this new tag, are not stored in the search engine’s index.
There are a few rules that go along with the use of the new tag:
- It only applies to pages in the same domain or sub domain
- It can be an absolute or relative link (although Yahoo! suggest using absolute links to be on the safe side)
- Search engines will still examine pages algorithmically in case the canonical page specified does not exist or the content on the ‘duplicate’ page is not essentially the same.
The following links provide details directly from the ‘horses’ mouths.”
Canonical link announcement on the Official Google Webmaster Central blog.
Microsoft’s canonical link annoucement.
The following two links provide canonical link plugins for WordPress.
No duplicate content plugin for WordPress.
Joost de Valk’s canonical plugin for WordPress
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Leave a Reply