Comments on: New Canonical Link Tag Will Help with Duplicate Content

By: Krishna Kanth

Krishna Kanth — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 05:43:15 +0000

Can I use only Canonical instead of 301 Redirect. Please mail if possible else reply me.

By: The Koi Man

The Koi Man — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:09:12 +0000

Alright, thanks Dave and Dan for your help.

By: Dan Schulz

Dan Schulz — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 02:24:59 +0000

You’re right, Dave. It’s only for domains you control. In other words, it’s meant to be used only within a site, not across multiple sites (unless those sites are hosted on multiple subdomains associated with the same domain).

From the Google blog:

(Not sure if you folks accept HTML or not, so I’m going to copy/paste it as unformatted text.)

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Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?

No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest http://www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com.
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By: Dave Bascom

Dave Bascom — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:58:26 +0000

We’re all still trying to understand this new feature, too, but as far as I understand, it is for domains that you own/control, and only for identical content, not scraped or syndicated content pages.

By: The Koi Man

The Koi Man — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:45:25 +0000

Is this Canonical Link Tag relating to just on site tagging or across the web? For example if I wrote an article and posted on my site first and then submitted to several article directories, search engines will know that I am the original source? Help me out please.

By: Agent SEO

Agent SEO — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:00:10 +0000

Here is the article from Google…good stuff!

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Joost de Valk’s WordPress Plugin is pretty cool!