Three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are all fighting duplicate content. In an effort to clean up duplicacy of content, they are implementing a new HTML tag – “ .” It is a Canonical Tag, which will allow all the web publishers to remove duplicate pages from their websites.

Nathan Buggia, a lead program manager at Microsoft said, “We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation.” He further added, “This is a clear benefit for publishers as it gives them an opportunity to get more exposure through search engines.”

In order to implement Canonical URL form on website, you have to add the following link tag at head section of the site’s HTML.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/products” />

For example:

• http://www.example.com/products?trackingid=feed
• http://www.example.com/products?sessionid=hgjkeor2
• http://www.example.com/products?printable=yes&trackingid=footer

According to Matt Cutts“There is a lot of clutter on the Web and with this, publishers will be able to clean up a lot of junk.” “I think it is going to gain traction pretty quickly,” he further added

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 5:33 am and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.