Welcome to absorbing.com – the home of Absorb Digital services

Google announced at last week’s SMX East that they intend to all allow cross domain support for the canonical tag by the end of the year. This means that if you have more than one website you can tell Google that a page on one domain is actually a duplicate of a page on another site.

This change will no doubt be widely welcomed by webmasters and SEO professionals. Websites currently run the risk of being penalised for duplicate content. And because Google can never be certain which site originally produced the content (only that which it indexed first), the wrong site may be penalised. Using a cross domain canonical tag will help prevent this from happening.

Of particular interest to Absorb is the use of duplicate content in ‘white label’ sites. Retail and travel sites often provide content to ‘white label’ affiliates, who effectively plug-in content taken from the parent site. This use of duplicate content has an obvious risk of damage to rankings to the original site. By using a cross domain canonical tag, we would be able to remove this danger and preserve rankings.

A few commentators are pointing to possible downsides of the new tag. Some voices suggest it will be a means to hijack content. However if, as we hope, Google ensures strict rules, e.g. that all sites are verified in Webmaster Tools, such a scenario is unlikely.

Interestingly Bing and Yahoo have similarly shown interest in supporting the use of a canonical tag, but only within the same domain.