Google's New Idea for Duplicate Content

Quite a lot of SEO's were getting excited about the news of Google's new canonical attribute. As far as I can work out, it's basically a way to tell the search engines about the origin of content which could be reproduced on your website, so as not to be penalised by duplicating content.

A strip of code is placed in the head of the html document to "re-direct" any messy urls (those with session id's, tracking info, or other figures and numbers) to a clean url. I think the idea around it, is to try and tidy up the web a little and stop producing duplicate content in SERPs.

I'm not exactly sure of the implications and long term benefits or disadvantages this might have, as it's obviously something very new, and can only be used within the same domain - you can't re-direct a page to another website. I'd be happy to hear any comments or ideas, too, regarding this move, so feel free to post.

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