subject: Google Rel=canonical Element Comes Up With Brand New Site Duplicacy Support Feature [print this page] Recently Google has announced that now it is offering cross-domain rel=Canonical support. Which means if you would have to migrate to a new domain for any of the reason and your web server does not support server-side redirections then to avoid from the duplicate content issue you can use rel=canonical link element in your webpages.
Though the rel=canocical link element was introduced long time ago yet we could not use it for cross-domain support but now Google has improved its version a bit more and it can be used to escape with content duplicacy issue in case you are migrating a site to a new domain.
As per the statement made by John Mueller a Webmaster Trend Analyst Google Zurich For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to [have] duplicate content across different websites for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. He also said that There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects," he says. "This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel='canonical' link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel='canonical' link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.
He also give some ways to handle coss-domain content duplication. Some of them are you need to choose your preferref domain first, reducing in-site duplication, enable crawling and wherever possible use 301 redirections, and the last way is the newest one use rel=canonical to the cross-domain. One things webmasters need to take care while using this tag is you shouldnt use noindex meta tag on pages and these pages shouldnt be disallowed from robots.txt file.
It seems like everyday Google making it easy for webmaster and developers to handle a website and its issues.
