Canonical

Posted: 20 February 2009

It's not often that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agree on something, so when they jointly launch a new standard it's worth taking a look at. In this case it's a really simple standard – just a tag – but it's going to make a big difference to search engine optimisation. What's more, this isn't some pre-announcement of some future development, it's here now, and neatComponents already supports it.

So what is it? The canonical tag is a simple way of saying that two pages are actually the same. For example, say you have a page www.example.com/27 and you have a DirectURL on it of  www.example.com/news. In the eyes of the search engines these are two different pages, and any PageRank will be split between them. Worse, they may spot that the content looks the same, and penalise you under the misapprehension you are trying to trick them with 'duplicate content'.

The Canonical tag come sto the rescue by allowing you to say that both URLs are really the same page. The canonical tag allows you to specify the URL you'd prefer them to use (so often you'd make it the DirectURL). With the Canonical tag in place, the search engines from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will understand that both URL are the same page, and aggregate all their information about them – inward links, PageRank etc.

You can learn more about neatComponents support for the Canonical tag here.