Canonical Tags

Hi,
The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. It's rare that we cover search engine announcements or "news items" here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education.
 
They are,
>seoreviewtools.com/canonical-url-location-checker
>seositecheckup.com/tools/url-canonicalization-test
>coderseo.com/rel-canonical-url-code-tool
 
Canonicalization can be a challenging concept to understand (and hard to pronounce: "ca-non-ick-cull-eye-zay-shun"), but it's essential to creating an optimized website. The fundamental problems that canonicalization can fix stem from multiple uses for a single piece of writing–a paragraph or, more often, an entire page of content–that appears in multiple locations on one website or on multiple websites. For search engines, this presents a conundrum: Which version of this content should they show to searchers? SEOs refer to this issue as duplicate content

To provide the best user experience, search engines will rarely show multiple, duplicate pieces of content and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original (or best).
 
Canonical Tag is used to deal with Duplicate Content. The problem with many sites is that they have pages that are identical or nearly identical. This can happen when your site has many categories, paths, and dynamic data.
 
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