Duplicate contents have always been any issue with many webmasters, where sometimes they cannot help adding similar contents on multiple URLs or web pages. This however, tends to confuse the search engines while indexing the websites. This could be perceived negatively by the search engines, and could indirectly impact the search engine rankings as well.
Now Google has come up with a solution to tackle this issue. The webmasters can now tell the search engine about which URL is the main one they want indexed, especially if multiple web pages have similar contents.
The webmasters can now use the new element, rel=”canonical” on HTTP headers to let the search engine know about which is the page that they would want indexed as main. Even though the Google algorithms are much more complex than that, it would surely help the webmasters sort out their duplicate content issues while optimizing their websites for search engines.
