[LINK] Canonical tag announced

[Lea de Groot]

On 20/02/2009, at 5:20 AM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:

> Much of this "cesspool" comes from duplicate content, and a tag has  
> now
> been revealed jointly from the three search engine giants that can  
> give
> your pages the URL format that they all prefer.

Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case.
There will be a few minor uses for this, but overall it won't change  
things.
Why?
Best as I can tell, it works *within* the site.
So its useful for me to tell the engines that page
http://example.com/page.html
is the canonical version
of
http://example.com/page.html?id=34545665743634
However, a competent developer will either not deliver dupe pages, or  
will not deliver them to a bot
and an incompetent developer will never have heard of the tag.

It won't help against scraping as it doesn't appear to be specified  
across sites (and how could it - the scrapers will just define their  
page as the canonical page)

So - cesspool, continue as is

(I'm not saying there won't be a few cases where its useful, but I am  
saying its not a magic solution to all dup content problems)

Lea
-- 
Lea de Groot
Brisbane, .au