Comments on: Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter

By: AnthonyDeegan

AnthonyDeegan — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:38:20 +0000

It was interesting to hear Matt Cutts interviewed on this, one of the ways Google deals with duplicate content is by use of the sitemap, the xml version that you provide them with. It’s definitely worth doing properly simply because it also allows you to set the importance of the pages to you, using a sliding scale.

By: fletchgqc

fletchgqc — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:39:26 +0000

Great idea to create this tag. Chances are that if you have simple duplicate content that Google is already handling it OK (see http://www.saltwebsites.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-no-mad-rush-implement), but it’s certainly nice to be able to definitively tell them about it and stop worrying.

By: diamara

diamara — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:49:18 +0000

Over at Wahanda, we’re having to modify quite a few different pages to support this, so we’ve created a Firefox plugin to help make the canonical URI more visible. You can download the extension here:

http://www.wahanda.com/inspire/canonical-uri-extension-for-firefox

By: dk

dk — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:41:06 +0000

Always welcome news to see that everyone is playing nice together- Big corps like Google usually just want to swallow up all the competition. At least for this brief announcement we can all sit a bit better with ourselves.

Great post, and thanks for including the tags in there with example. Should be a great help!

Cheers!

By: webconnoisseur

webconnoisseur — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:06:13 +0000

Cheers to the search engines for making this happen. Still lots of reason to not rely on this method, but it certainly makes some clean up jobs much easier.

By: maconrocks

maconrocks — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:12:13 +0000

That’s all well and good but it does nothing for the amount of simply unusable and unreliable content that is out there. I am still curious to see how someone can find a middle ground between human powered and mathematical search to provide some sort of filtering based on knowledge and experience. The only reliable start I have seen so far has been sweetsearch.com

By: William Alvarez

William Alvarez — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:59:52 +0000

I applause this initiative from the big G, Y! and MSN (aka Live), as Vanessa mentioned before, it’s a big help for e-commerce sites that live with this issue and becomes time consuming and expensive to support and solve.

By: Barrie Adams

Barrie Adams — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:59:14 +0000

This is very useful for the larger sites which I manage, we are always suffering from dupe content issues due to search and archive parameters and am looking forward to seeing this tried and tested.

Thank you Vanessa for the informative post.

By: macgizmoguy

macgizmoguy — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:28:34 +0000

Well, for those of us ‘Little Fish’ who aren’t SEO Sharks or Pro-Blogger Whales… this should help my handful of sites A LOT in the months ahead.

When I didn’t have truly good site Stats or Analytics in place, I often used ?ID= tracking URL’s to ascertain where traiffic was coming from — and was rather inconsistent using http://www.-prefix or not. The ‘dilution’ this has caused shows up pretty clearly in MSN Webmaster Tools in particular, followed by Yahoo SiteExplorer, and as always: The Google Monster’s GENTLY EVIL EYE has always seemed the smartest about the discrepancies… :)

So bring on the Canonical Smart Bots! It promises a ‘cleaner view’ of the internet for all of us.

By: Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Mikkel deMib Svendsen — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 08:10:42 +0000

The sad thing about this new tag is that I know how developers will react: Great, now we can continue to make crappy site architecture and then just add that tag to solve everything for us! I have already seen that on some developer forums.

The fact just is that the only way for you to keep full control is by making a good, solid and one dimensional site architecture- just as it always has been.

You don’t get a new car by adding a cheap layer of paint!