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Canonicalisation
Submitted by gary on Tue, 02/17/2009 - 12:11
A tag has now been revealed jointly from the three search engine giants that can give your pages the URL format that they all prefer. This is called the Canonical Tag and looks like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />
As Google explains (see here for example, and FAQ), you can simply add this tag to specify your preferred version of a URL inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&ses...
and the search engines will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.
If you have unanswered questions about the canonical tag, now is the time to ask. Google will be happy to answer them. Yahoo and Microsoft have additional posts about the tag.