Google has recently announced Canonical Link Support across the domains. Before we discuss this we need to understand Canonical link element.
Earlier this year Google announced a new link called Canonical Link. Basically it is a link element that can be used to avoid the duplicate content penalty.
How To Specify Canonical Link Element?
It is done in the HEAD part of the document after the <head> tag. Suppose a you have created a web page on marketing online and its URL is http://yourwebsite.com/marketing-online
Your WordPress or other CMS would also automatically create separate pages for tags, categories etc.
Thus another route to the same webpage might be
http://yourwebsite.com/tags/marketing
That would create two pages with same content.
To avoid this you can use canonical tag by adding <rel=canonical> followed by the actual URL. That would tell the search engine that the preferred URL for the content is the other URL.
Thus by adding
<link rel="canonical" href="http://yourwebsite.com/marketing-online"/>
in the HEAD part of the document, you are telling the search engines that the preferred location of this url (or the “canonical” location) is http://yourwebsite.com/marketing-online instead of http://yourwebsite.com/tags/marketing
Here is a little video explaining the concept in detail.
Earlier this canonical relation was supported within the domain. But recently Google has announced cross domain canonical support.
This is really important if you want to move your domain or do not want to or do not have facility of 301 redirects
Here is the detailed article at Web Pro News.
One last thing, Yoast has a nice plugin that automatically adds Canonical link to your WordPress pages.
Here are the details of plugin.
I have not used it but I have read good reviews of it.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Tags: canonical link, canonical Url, duplicate content, duplicate pages, search engine optimization, seo
