Google, Yahoo and Microsoft add support for canonical html tag

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft add support for <link> html tag

Three of the leading search engine companies Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that they are now supporting a new HTML tag: <link>

This new tag enables the webmaster to put the web page’s preferred link.

The <link> tag tells the search engine which page to index in case it lands on another page with the same content.

The aim is to prevent content duplication problems that exists on todays websites.

For example a typical webpage can have multiple URLs all of which might work fine:

http://test.com/a.html
http://test.com/a.html?print=yes
http://test.com/a.html?sid=xyz
http://test.com/a.html?source=newsletter

Adding the following code to the head section of the page:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://test.com/a.html” />

would tell the search engine which is the correct URL for the page.

This post page for example has this in its source code: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://news.techwhack.com/9909-canonical-url”/>

Checkout more information at:
Partnering to help solve duplicate content issues
Specify your canonical
Fighting Duplication: Adding more arrows to your quiver