Duplication Solved through Collaboration
Exciting but slightly nerdy news!!! At the beginning of February, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced that a new link attribute will be supported. It was created to give webmasters more control over pages that have the same content. The new attribute is rel="canonical". Google gives the following example of the attribute usage on the Webmaster Central blog: - link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=fish"/ All this was done to reduce the amount of duplicate content that has clogged up both the index and lead to unfair penalties to sites that display the same contents on separate pages. Google frustrated web masters with their penalties and the industry has argued successfully to have the new attribute added and now supported. Another victory for collaboration! To use the tag, simply place it in the head section of the duplicate content URLs. The tag can only be used on pages within a single site. The search engines recommend using absolute links, though relative links are also acceptable. Boutros Boutros Ghali
