Many site owners have wanted the recently introduced canonical tag to work across domains. Now their wishes will come true. Google announced cross-domain support will come by the end of the year.
The news came out during the Duplicate Content: The Search Engines Edition session at SMX East conference today. Google made the announcement in response to site owners again voicing that they wanted such a solution.
The existing canonical tag is only supported by Google, at the moment. Yahoo and Bing both said they’re studying support but think its likely they’ll add support by the end of the year. However, they’ll only support canonicalization across the same domain.
In a way, they’ll support Canonical Tag 1.0 by the end of the year, while Google will be supporting Canonical Tag 2.0, with cross-domain support.
We will have more information when more details come to us.
Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Domain Names & URLs | SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps | Top News
Cross-domain, huh? I thought the whole reason it wasn’t cross-domain to begin with, was so no one could falsely claim to be the canonical version of some authority domain, thereby hijacking the domain. Can’t you see it? Some dork just sets the tag on his buy-your-pills-here.com as the canonical url for google.com . :)
Ok, am assuming Google has a way to ensure that hijacking can’t happen, but I sure hope they make sure there are no holes in the plan.
Erm, whats wrong with linking to the original source? The SEs are making the issue more complicated than it needs to be. They should just preach a little bit about link love if you steal content (or heavily quote) and that would resolve the issue right? More people know how to implement a link than a canonical and it’s better for users.
It is a good idea, but how many rss aggregators are there out there that duplicate content and nobody gets an obvious drop in rankings from it? It may become more relevant in the future, especially if google is announcing things about it, but for now I don’t see a huge impact on duplicate content… and they also have to make sure the “spammy” aggregators don’t use the tag to claim the original source, which sounds to me like the biggest challenge for any tag that will work across domains.
Bottom line – I don’t know how they will do this without it being abused.
Aaron
http://www.ezwebsitemonitoring.com/