Canonical SEO Tag

Last week big news happened in the SEO world as Yahoo, Google and MSN announced that they will be supporting a new Tag, it is the "Canonical URL Tag". The purpose of this tag is to help webmasters eliminate duplicate content problems.

The usage of this tag is pretty simple, you should place the tag in the header of your html, it uses a rel parameter, for example:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.unlimitedwebdesigns.com/blog">

If I were to place the above code in other web page, it would basically tell the search engines to treat that particular web page as though it were a copy of the URL http://www.unlimitedwebdesigns.com. The search engines would treat the page with the canonical tag as a copy of the URL specified in the rel parameter.

It is very similar to a 301 redirect, but much more easier to implement. you're telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one, without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL.

At Unlimited Web Designs, we believe this is huge news, and should make the job easier to the search engines, to deliver unique and relevant content. It should also make the job easier to the SEO consultants that want to avoid the creation of duplicate content issues within a site.