Google and Yahoo Release new Duplicate Content Tag

i.e.

<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


http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-adding-more-arrows-to-your-quiver/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Another tool to use in content duplication control.

Live/MSN also supports this tag:
http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx

Thanks for the info, this should help a bit.

Thanks for the post. Again to avoid dup content is important.

This seems like a good idea, but I'm still skeptical. Is this going to alert google that you're performing SEO? Shouldn't you take care of duplicate content issues anyway, without using a tag? There are many things to consider here.

Google do not have any problem if some one performing SEO with google guidelines i.e, ethical approach. In fact now they are providing Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, have a look at http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Only people who are afraid to do this are the people who are doing something dodgy

That's not necessarily true. I won't be doing this, and I'm not doing anything dodgy, I just know how to clean up duplicate content on my own without hacks.

Valid, but this was put in place to help people who might not know programming (that just an opinion). You say that it will "alert google that you're performing SEO" why would that matter? Everyone who has a website are doing seo in some way or another, albiet a very small way. If google then starts penalizing people who are doing SEO then why tell people what rules not to break. They were put in place for this very reason, for people to do SEO and build a information website, brand, or even a shopping website.

I want google to know im doing SEO, so that as long as i am not breaking their guidelines they know that i feel my website/s should be at the top as its relevant and reliable with the information/products located on it.

Adding on it, If website is following SEO guidelines that provided by google, It will help Google to diagnose the quality and relevance easily.

canonical tag. it's very useful, though I haven't tried it yet, but I already have read some good reviews regarding this. hats off to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Good for joomla users

All the major search engines support canonicals now. This is something they should be able to detect by themselves and now they want us to specify it.

Yes, this is bad news for us. What if its not reliable then our content will be always treated bad.

Has anyone experimented with this. How strong is it. Does it only work to shorten the same urls or can it be used in place of a redirect ie suggests a whole range of other uses for this meta.