The Minority Report

Uh…don’t you mean that Google innovated again and Yahoo and Microsoft sighed and just followed…(nofollowed) along…again?

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have banded together to support an unofficial standard for steering search engines in the right direction.

All three on Thursday announced they’d support a technique by which a little extra code in a Web page can indicate the address of its “canonical” version–essentially, the original, primary URL. The move will make it easier to tell search engines what they should pay attention to and to avoid treating duplicative Web pages as different.

Today, the search engine bots that scour the Web for pages to index don’t have any particular way to know whether they should be pointing to a “http://www.somepage.com/index.html” or “http://www.somepage.com/index.html?lang=en”–the latter with an optional extra tidbit at the end that indicates the Web server should show the English-language version of a page. The new canonical tag can steer search engines toward the desired primary page, which in this example might ease browsing for non-English speakers.

Search giants join to tidy up Web addresses | Business Tech – CNET News

Update:
I found more about this on Yoast and a cool new WordPress plugin to put the new “canonical” tag in your header. Get the plugin here.

Suppose you have read my Twitter Analytics post, and you’ve started tagging all the URL’s you spread on Twitter with Google Analytics campaign variables. So at some point, Google enters your site through this URL:

http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter

&utm_campaign=twitter

If it did, in “old times”, this would mean you’d have a duplicate content issue: the same content indexed under two different URL’s. An issue SEO’s have been trying to solve on web pages for ages, which sometimes created huge limitations. This is where the new tag comes in. You add this code to the section of your page:

And now, Google will suddenly count the links it has seen to that campaign tagged URL, towards the canonical URL, and not index the campaign tagged URL anymore. Simple, yet effective. Cool huh?

Canonical URL links – Yoast – Tweaking Websites