With the creation of the canonical tag, the existence of a particular content in multiple links is not considered as duplicate. Finally, content can now be freely archived and searched. SEOs do not need to worry anymore about their rankings because of the new link structure.
The use of the canonical tag is better understood with an example. We all know that a blog post can exist in multiple links: a regular blog post page (http://www.sitename.com/blog/?p=12), a blog post page with permalink structure (http://www.sitename.com/blog/2009/02/blog-post-name/), a search results page (http://www.sitename.com/blog/?search=SEO) or the home page (http://www.sitename.com/blog). With this in mind, we risk the uniqueness of the content because it exists in multiple links. We may also face some problems with search engines since they only allot a particular amount of bandwidth for each website. If they manage to crawl all the pages you have that contains the same content, this may hurt your rankings.
This is where the canonical tag comes in. It simply ‘hints’ the search engine on which link to index. To do this, one has to simply put <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.sitename.com/blog/2009/02/blog-post-name /” /> within the <head> tags. The search engines will simply read this and take the hint that all other links must be ignored and only the link indicated in the canonical tag must be indexed.
Of course, this is good news for a lot of SEOs. They can now tell the search engines which part of the site to index and which to ignore. It gives both the writer and search engine an easier job.
However, this raises the question on whether or not the canonical tag will be abused. What if a website who copies its content from another site proclaims itself as canonical? Will the search engine index the other site? It is not pointed out if the tag is only applicable in one domain. The only thing one can count on is the human element in Google’s ranking system. They are the only people who can determine which is the real website to rank.
Although the search engines guaranteed that they will only use the tag 99% of the time, it still raises a lot of issues such as the abuse of sploggers and scrapers. Having the human element only 1% of the time will automate processes and please SEOs. However, it will also provide lots of venues for abuse and less security for honest web developers.
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