Advanced Internet Marketing

The canonical domain tag is a new tag that allows different versions of a webpage to be consolidated into one. This is a quick fix for duplicate content problems. I won’t go into detail on the tag itself and how and why it works, but I have one problem with this tag… Will the canonical domain tag dumb down SEO/website design?

I have several legacy sites that I look after and they are far from ideal in their design. They have indexed session ID tags, vast URLs, and several other duplicate content problems. Now, I know that I could get the rel=Canonical tag to fix most of these problems and stop pestering the development team on best practices. But I know that by designing things right in the first place will save work in the long run. I have seen Patrick Altoft refer to it as “papering over the cracks” and to be honest I’d rather nag my developers and get the job done properly first time!

I don’t want to have to deal with another ancient and unwieldy website, so I will keep to using the tag on sites where development time is strictly limited. I won’t make my developers aware of the tag either, in case they decide it’s the quick fix to save them the effort of the “best practice” approach. Just my thought on the subject!