A new tag has come into play for webmasters this past year. The top search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft said back in February that their search engine spiders will acknowledge the “canonical” tag.

The tag which appears in the header of your webpage looks like:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/page.html”/>

But what the heck does it do?

Well it instructs the spiders to index your page using the URL assigned to the href. For example if the actual URL of the page is “http://www.dailyindia.com/user.php?id=johnbob&status=abcd” and in that page I have
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.dailyindia.com/johnbob.html”/> the site will be indexed as “http://www.dailyindia.com/johnbob.html”.

The end result is pretty similar to that of a 301 redirect, perhaps just easier to understand and to implement. The 301 is still stronger because it applies to both spiders and humans.