Search giants unite against duplicate content

Despite being search engine competitors, when it comes to search engine optimisation Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are putting on a united front.

The three have joined together in a bid to rid the web of duplicate content by implementing a new canonical tag.

Currently, a web page could have multiple URLs pointing to it which causes a problem by only allowing the search engine crawler to crawl less of the website and it also means that not every page could end up with a full link credit.

However, now the canonical version can be specified in the page tag within the head section using a relative or absolute link.

Search Engine Land's Vanessa Fox claims that the new tag should become a best practice among web page creators, particularly if the content rendered by URLs is similar, the canonical URL is the shortest version or it uses simple parameter patterns.

"Site owners have been asking for help with these issues for a really long time so this should be a greatly welcomed addition," she added.

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