RSS 2.0 Feed

Practical uses for the new Google cross-domain canonical link element

Posted on 18th December 2009 at 1:14 pm by Simon Howland

The cross-domain canonical link element, albeit only currently supported by Google, is a welcome addition to the webmaster's toolkit. Read on for practical examples of how you can use it in your SEO campaigns.

Google is one step ahead of Bing and Yahoo! in allowing the canonical link element to be applied across domains, and we expect the other search engines to follow suit in due course. This is particularly important as, where websites may have previously used the canonical link element within a site and are now pointing to another site, not only do Yahoo!/Bing not canonicalise cross-domain, but they’ll also lose the existing canonical reference, which makes things even worse for them.

For now, this is the closest thing to a permanent redirect in Google for where users can’t implement a 301 redirect for whatever reason, and will come as welcome news to some. However, we need to remember that this is not a guaranteed outcome as Google explained in its post:

“While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.”

All of the previous uses of the canonical link element are still valid – however, this opens up a number of new potential uses:

You can now move your site to a new domain even when you don’t have control of server headers (such as on free hosts like Google-owned Blogger).
As a temporary measure before 301 redirects can be properly implemented.
Landing pages on domains registered for tracking offline campaigns can pass the benefit of any links back to the main domain.
It will be possible to allow affiliates to create affiliate web sites which not only won’t compete against your website in the search results, but will even help the rankings of your own site (although this can’t be guaranteed). Obviously, this is something that the affiliates will have to agree to, and won’t be suitable for all programmes.
Similar to the above, it will allow for syndicating content out to third parties in a way which won't threaten to compete against your site for rankings, and might also help your site to rank better. It's quite possible that this will lead to changes in the market for syndicated content, with prices potentially dropping (or even free) for syndicated content which uses this element. Again, this is something that partners will have to agree beforehand.

Google even touched on the above possibility, but it seems that (for the time being at least) it has decided to make this optional - in Google's blog post announcing this new feature, it says

“We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel="canonical", if both parties agree.”

Legacy systems, lack of technical know-how or internal policy all too often prohibit the changes required to improve a site’s rankings. Given the benefits of this new feature, I expect to see lots of creative uses to be dreamt up.

Let’s just hope that they are all designed with good intentions and that this does not become a target for misuse.

File under: google yahoo! microsoft redirects canonical

Permalink

Comments

No-one has commented so far, or all comments are awaiting moderation.

Post Your Comment

If you would like to be alerted when there are new comments to read please enter your email address below.

RSS 2.0 Feed

« Search engines and clutter

15 of the best SEO add-ons for Google Chrome »

Search

Archive

Tag Cloud

Subscribe

RSS 2.0 Feed

Practical uses for the new Google cross-domain canonical link element

Comments

Post Your Comment

Subscribe

RSS 2.0 Feed