Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Google, Yahoo! & MSN Join Forces on New SEO Tag

Yahoo! Search Blog » Blog Archive » Fighting Duplication: Adding more arrows to your quiver: "Avoiding duplicates in the search engine index has consistently been a key concern we’ve heard from webmasters and site owners. Over the last few years, we have made significant strides in finding duplicates in our crawler and index algorithmically and provided webmasters with better tools for controlling these. Today we are announcing our support for a new HTML tag, the tag, which helps reduce duplicates by documenting the preferred URL form to access each page.

When you use the tag, you can indicate the canonical URL form for crawlers to use for each page of content, no matter how it was retrieved. This puts the preferred URL form with the content so that it is always available to the crawler, no matter which session id, link parameter, sort parameter, parameter order, or other source of variance is present in the URL form used to access the page.

To do this, specify a tag in the specify a < ...link > tag in the < head> section of your page content:

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

The above tag indicates to the crawler that the URL it is present on should be represented canonically as http://www.example.com/products. This would eliminate the following duplicates:

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


Search Engine Marketing Blog by ineedhits: Google, Yahoo! & MSN Join Forces on New SEO Tag: "Its rare to see the three big search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) working together on a SEO standard, but at the SMX conference this week, they announced unanimous support for a new tag to address canonicalization issues.

For those of you unfamiliar with canonicalization, here's wikipedia's definition as a quick intro:

'canonicalization ... is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a 'standard' canonical representation.'
Let's look at a quick example:"

Labels:

Google
Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.