The canonical url tag has been around for a while, but it is about to become much more important in optimizing your websites for use by search engines, according to SEOmozBlog.

Search Engine Journal carried a news story earlier this month on the announcement by Google, Yahoo!, and Live regarding the canonical url tag.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft join hands in the drive to clean up the web of duplicate contents. The top three search engines are implementing support for the new HTML tag - "link".

Matt Cutts had a pretty good explanation of the canonical url tag all the way back in 2006:

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it's a strange word; that's what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com


• example.com/


• www.example.com/index.html


• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google "canonicalizes" a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

So what does this mean for you? Basically, it means consolidating stats that previously had been spread over four pages (in the case above) into a single number that gives search engines a better way to analyze where your content really stands in their rankings. The SEOmozBlog article talks about the implications in some detail.


Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 5682006