One session that was left out of the 2009 SMX Advanced conference in Seattle last week was "Duplicate Content Solutions and the canonical label. This was a briefing with some excellent examples of the benefits revealed by the optimizers. Most importantly, a confirmation number of events were performed by search engines in its use and benefits.

The fact that Matt Cutts of Google is following this session on Twitter and felt compelled to leave of its meeting on social media and the fall of the last 20 minutes of this session to take the microphone, provides gain a real picture Google exactly how important in considering the use of this label.

A bit of recent history, in April this year at SMX Sydney, said search engines Accepted the use of the label of the canonical connection. The idea is that if a website will somehow produce duplicate content pages, you could use this tag point or link to the page or duplicate pages Back to home so that the engines are recognized and only index of the source page, not the page of duplicates.

This sounds very simple and looking at the statistics, seems to have been well accepted by the webmasters.

The no follow tag was proposed as standard practice by Google for about three years ago, with only 1% of websites now use this tag.

The label REL Canonical proposed as a standard practice just 3 months with Bing confirm 1.6% of websites are already using this tag.

That is a amazing capture in just 3 months.

Some good reasons to use the label are:

Sites load balancing problems of creating content doubled between the types of ww or HTTP and HTTPS sites with versions of the pages.

If the page ranks poorly in the SERP, the label bad one and the search engines directly to the desired page.

If two results are appearing in the SERP, label each other to create a good list.

CMS key problems causing friendly and dynamic URLs to the same page.

Like a funnel 301, a tag page URL through an old page to replace the new URL

Now, here's some important data confirmed by Google during the session:

The label works within a domain across subdomains and subfolders, but does NOT work in all fields root.

The label does not pass PageRank as a 301 redirect.

The label does not pass the story, like a 301 redirect.

The label value does not pass anchor text of hyperlinks.

REL tag to the page of a URL that 301 redirects blocks the flow, this was declared by Matt Cutts.

REL Canonical label has been described as "the poor 301. This is something worth considering for general use of the website owners.

If you have a website on a server that does not have an access level that allows you to set up 301 redirects when moving or change the page, but instead can leave a page in the URL of the old page and insert the label of Canonical REL to pass PageRank and history of the old page to the new page.

Something to note is that Google calls the label of a "strong indication" of the engines. Now I think they do more because they are unsure that the label works 100% of the time, but that does not want to use the label and not rely on it.

This theory is supported by Matt Cutts indicating that they are happy to provide examples of when the label has not worked properly for website owners or target = "_self"> search engine optimizers, leaving instances in Google webmaster forums. Google will actively move forward and look to correct these problems and adjust the robot to stop issues.

Several examples of the tag does not work correctly Matt Cutts was provided during the session and seemed committed with the understanding of the issues of why it had not worked and fixing them.

So I think the motors are firmly committed to Canonical label use REL and see it as a realistic way of cleaning up duplicate content on the network. Duplicate content is an important issue for the engines as they have done for continue to build data centers for managing web content.

Duplicate content is also a problem for site owners as it gives rise to site web of sanctions and lost rankings.

What seemed to come through the session is that website owners may not use more than tag and maybe a little more restricted in their use?

Certainly, I think Google hinted at this as perhaps there are still unknown forms of manipulation use. Top Optimizers seemed to agree that overuse of the label or the lack of planning its use could lead to negative internal structure make Link to a website.

Web site owners should also consider doing everything possible to clean the sites and let the problems of content Duplicate label and use only when other best practices can not be applied, therefore using the smart tag and not just as a temporary solution for development lazy.

The session will also lead to the use of the label forward on the label REL, and how the label is no longer those treated by Google in recent days. Some important changes have occurred in which I will not follow in my next post.

About the Author:

Gavin Messenger is a leading Australian optimiser & currently the SEO Manager at dgm Australia with over 10 years SEO experience & having recently won an Australian IAB Award for his work at dgm.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – The Importance of the Canonical REL Tag for Websites

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