Rel Canonical. Google Keeps Its Word Whilst Bing and Yahoo Fail To Provide
July 22nd, 2010 by Simon
Canonicalisation:
This is the issue when there is more than one version of the same site available but through a different URL, examples of this below:
http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/index.html
http://example.com/
http://example.com/index.html
This is required to be fixed so that there is only one variant of the available site, ideally through a 301 redirect.
It’s always been a common standpoint that canonicalisation fixes are best done via .htaccess or control panel redirects on iis servers.
However some webmasters don’t have access to such methods. In an effort to level the playing field Google Yahoo and Microsoft joined forces a year ago to ensure that the tag.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/“>
Was an appropriate replacement for redirects.
However even though we were told they would take it into account we recently came across a client that had a rel canonical tag pointing to a differentdomain that wasn’t theirs.
Our research found that yahoo and bing still did not take this tag into account and the site was being crawled and cached the same way it would with or without the tag. Google however took special note of the tag and the cache showed the url of the site that was in the rel canonical tag and not the site the tag was one.
How much weight google gives this is vast compared to the others. It shows google is keeping to its word we can see why they are the forefront of online search.
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