Big news for Sites with affiliates – Google, Yahoo and MSN agree

The news broke yesterday of a new directive from the search engines: canonical URLs. This allows webmasters to tell the search engines which are the correct (canonical) pages which Google should use in the results. Comparison sites, insurance sites and affiliate destinations will benefit from this move. So how does it work?

Suppose you had multiple pages indexed in Google which are all the same page. They appear in the search results, competing with each other therefore, not quite getting the rank they should. The reason is becuase you have inbound links to these pages. Normally they are affiliate landing pages that you use to track you sales.

Now, you can put a tag in the head section of your non affiliate page all your pages to tell the search engines which is the correct page without variables – no more duplicate content issues! Edit: to clear up confusion.

It also helps sites with multiple URL variables, sessionIDs, customised content etc.

This was a slightly technical post for our more savvy users. For the unabriged version, I suggest you read up on Joost’s post.