Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith

We learned today during the “Duplicate Content Issues: The Search Engine Edition” session at SMXEast that Google is studying taking the rel=canonical tag to the next level.

If you have some pages with very similar content on your site, the duplicate pages are generally supressed in the search results, but what if Google suppresses the wrong one? Using the rel=canonical tag in the head section of a page tells Google which page is the preferred page to appear in the search results. (Read Google’s Webmaster Central Blog for more details.)

Google Senior Software Engineer Joachim Kupke shared today during the Q&A portion of the session that Google is researching and testing the next step of the tag: cross-domain canonical tags. For example, if a company releases a press release on its site and then distributes that release elsewhere, a cross-domain canonical tag could tell Google which domain is the original content and therefore should appear in the results. This should be in place within the year.

This is an exciting development that brought cheers & applause from the audience of advanced SEOers!

– Stacey Morgan Smith