Search Marketing Insights (Emerging Search Trends)
Canonical URL Tag Upgrade
By: Jamie Keaney, Senior Search Strategist
When Google announced the addition of the canonical tag element to reduce duplicate content on the internet it was met by marketers with both praise and skepticism. The announcement of upgrading the current tag with cross-domain functionality came just eight months after the major search engines agreed to honor the tag.
As a quick review, the canonical tag is added to a Web site’s HTML code. The tag indicates to search engines where they can find the canonical version of the URL and begin indexing only that version. It works similar to a 301 redirect, but only directs the search engine, not the visitor, to the canonical page.
The canonical tag has seen steady adoption rates and can be a viable option in reducing duplicate content for some marketers. It’s relatively easy to implement and passes link equity just as a 301 redirect does.
Other options to clean up their URLs are rewriting them, or building better information architecture. But this solution can be expensive, and take many man hours. Some Web sites are able to implement 301 redirects efficiently, which is a very similar solution to the canonical tag. Submitting a sitemaps file to the engine’s Webmaster centrals can also help. Solutions will vary with each Web site; it’s important to know your Web site’s history and limitations before recommending a fix for URL canonicalization.
That leads us to the new canonical tag capabilities announced by Google at SMX East in New York a few weeks ago. Dubbed “canonical tag 2.0”, Google made public their plans to add cross-domain functionality. This means that content producers, such as newspapers, who have their content hijacked and presented as original material can reclaim it and point to themselves as the original content producer, thus increasing their own chances of being ranked well for queries related to the content.
That news was met with skepticism from Bing and Yahoo. Both engines would have to go through extensive testing of that feature before adopting it into their systems. It will be many months before Google is ready to roll out the change, and several more until Bing and Yahoo begin to recognize the new functionality.
The canonical tag can be a simple solution for some marketers, but it isn’t always the best option available. Creating a well-structured site is optimal. As our clients begin adopting the tag, we’ll update others of their outcome.
Duplicate Content: multiple URLs that lead to the same content, which can reduce link value to that page and cause erroneous indexing by search engines.
Canonicalization: the process of conforming all URLs to a single, standard variation.
301 Redirect: a redirect that induces a browser to go to another location
Canonical Tag “2.0”: an upgrade in functionality by Google to the original canonical tag that allows for cross-domain redirects.
“Anywhere from 10 – 36% of Web hosts are duplicated content.”
-- Matt Cutts, Google Engineer
