With the acceptance of the canonical tag by the “big dogs” in the search engine game, information for implementing it are now readily available on the World Wide Web. As always, some sources are more reliable than others and the quality and quantity of information varies widely from one resource to the next. In the list below we’ve tried to assemble a few resources with information we think will be of value.
For questions on support for a new web implementation within the search engines, it’s always a good idea to start with the search engines themselves. Here are a few contributions from the search engine guys:
Google’s own Webmaster Central blog has a great discussion on reasons to use the tag, how to implement it and how Google handles it. Several questions from users have also been addressed in the comments section. Scroll down – Google does answer eventually:
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Here’s MSN’s blog, with some information on how MSN’s Live will be implementing support for the canonical tag:
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And here’s where Yahoo Search weighs in with their comments and information on how their search engine will treat the tag:
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If you prefer to listen to an expert talk about the subject, Web Pro News provides this video interview with Matt Cutts of Google, Inc:
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SEO experts are another good source to turn to when a new optimization tool becomes available for use by developers. SEOmoz provides this blog entry that explains the tag and its usage with some nice graphic visualizations of canonical relationships. It also quotes the search engine pages and raises some interesting questions:
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For those developers or webmasters who utilize Content Management Systems like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, contributing developers have created plugins for support of the new tag. Here are a few direct download links for the more popular CMS:
WordPress: link
Magento: link
Drupal: link
And one for Joomla that includes a tutorial: link
Last, but not least, it’s always good to hear both sides of the story. Here are few comments from “the Oracle”. We’ll let you be the judge on whether they’re pertinent:
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