Video Guide to using the new Canonical Tag

By Howard Farmer • Mar 13th, 2009 • Category: SEO Guides

Canonical Tag Guide

It has been annouced that the 3 big search engines have come up with a new canonical tag to help with canonical issues.

Here are the announcements:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-adding-more-arrows-to-your-quiver/
http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx

Example of use:

So we want to create a page named duplicate-copy.html …. So in the tag part of the HTML header area on duplicate-copy.html (the same section you’d find the Title attribute and Meta Description tag). In fact, this tag isn’t new, but like nofollow, simply uses a new rel parameter. For example:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.seoadviser.info/something" />

This would tell the SearchEngines: Yahoo, Live & Google that this page, duplicate-copy.html , should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.seoadviser.info/something and that all of the link & content algorithm data the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.

Matt Cutts – guru and prolific blogger – from Google explains how to use the new Canonical Tag

Howard Farmer is

Howard Farmer - over 20 years of IT experience with IBM, Lotus, GE and Ameridata.
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One Response »

Doug - Velocity, B2B Marketing Agency on March 26th, 2009 at 9:47 pm:
Nice, clear video. Nice, clear advice.
When you’ve got such an articulate and expert who’s also comfortable on screen — use him!