Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all came together early this year to support the use of canonical tags. But what are canonical tags and what’s the use to us?

Canonical tags were created to help address the problem of duplicate content. We already know that there are already existing ways to address this problem such as 301 redirects and the use of sitemaps, however, in many instances these solutions are not enough. To make life easier for webmasters canonical tags were created. The tags help with duplicate content by telling search engines what URL you want them to index in place of a page’s uglier URL version. The syntax is also very simple and makes use of only one line that needs to be typed into the HEAD part of the page document. For example if you have a page with a URL like http://www.somepage.com/ example.html?sid=54321 you of course would prefer the search engine not to index that URL, especially if you have a nicer duplicate URL like http://www.somepage.com/example.html. So what do you do? All you need to do is type in:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.somepage.com/example.html"/>

And search engines will automatically honor your wishes. No sweat. Duplicate issues resolved. Now that’s one less problem you won’t need to worry about.

You can also watch Matt Cutts’ interview with WebProNews last February to learn more about canonical tags.

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