Yesterday afternoon Google announced, via their Webmaster Central Blog, that they are now supporting the use of canonical link elements across domains to help webmasters avoid some of the tricky duplicate content issues that can arise when, for example, moving an entire website to a new domain.

The rel=”canonical” link element is a way for webmasters to indicate to search engine bots which page contains the original content, and therefore which page should rank for any related search terms.

Google do point out though that the search engine does not take rel=”canonical” as gospel; instead using it as a hint as to which page it should index.  Instead of using canonical linking they suggest that, where possible, permanent 301 redirects are a more desirable solution.  However every situation is slightly different and it is definitely a bonus that where 301 redirects are simply not an option we can use rel=”canonical” across domains.

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