The top 3 search engines Google,Yahoo and Microsoft have come together in order to launch a new "canonical" link tag which will handle the problem of duplicate content.This tag assists webmasters in order to determine which URL they require the search engines to concentrate on when the website contains a lot of vastly similar or duplicate contents which is pointed to by many URLs.

Joachim Kupke, senior software engineer, and Maile Ohye, developer programs tech lead at Google have mentioned that this tag provides an opportunity to have greater control over the URL's which are returned in search results,if your site has identical contents,corresponding to different URL's

Assume the following 2 pages contain similar contents
http://www.canonicaldemo.com/product.php?items=allequipments
http://www.canonicaldemo.com/product.php?items=equipments

Suppose we need the search engine to display this page in the results page
http://www.canonicaldemo.com/product.php?items=equipments,

then the canonical tag has to be used in the following manner
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.canonicaldemo.com product.php?items=equipments"/>

Labels: canonical element, canonical tag, google, link tag, microsoft, seo news, yahoo

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