17 February, 2009
New Canonical Link Element to Ease SEO and URL Rewriting
Posted by Ben Rowland in Marketing, Web technology, SEO,
Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have announced support for a new HTML element: the canonical link element. This element will allow developers to specify the "friendly" version of URLs to search engines via a special new HTML tag. This is big news for websites that make use of URL rewriting, an increasingly common trick to mask dynamic URLs with more friendly keywords. Such sites frequently wind up with duplicate URLs in search engines such as Google. This is also big news for developers, who have a difficult time preventing search engines from finding and indexing this duplicate content.
Instead of having a URL such as: http://www.tecture.com/?id=123, you might want to refer to that page by it's friendly name: http://www.tecture.com/Pages/Blog
Simply specify the canonical link in this new HTML element:
For more information on this, I'd suggest you check out Matt Cutts' post Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes.