Canonical Tags

Search Engine algorithms are becoming Intelligent and sophisticated, you know why i am saying this? now spiders can identify the duplicate pages in a domain using Canonical tags.

What is mean by canonical ? meaning as per the dictionary as follows

• Appearing in a biblical canon
  "a canonical book of the Christian New Testament"
  
  
• Of or relating to or required by canon law
  
  
• Reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality
  "a canonical syllable pattern"
  
  
• Conforming to orthodox or recognized rules "the drinking of cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing"
  
  
  Canonical tags can be placed just like a no follow tag in a web page
  
  
  

It is a new way to inform search engine spiders about the duplicate URLs in your domain, earlier search marketers doesn't have option apart from 301 redirect and Robots.txt, now its become very easy for them to inform search engine spiders using canonical tag about the duplicate pages from websites and in my opinion this tags can be very much useful in conditions such as Dynamic Sites where the pages will create on the fly and the URLs having Session IDS

Now the question arises whether page rank and other link references of the page can be transferred and retained on the canonicalized page? and the answer is yes. Like 301 redirect, now canonical tags will also retain the page rank, back links and other credentials to the canonicalized page.

Major Search engines such as Yahoo, Google, MSN has already announced about this tags and how to use it judiciously on the web pages

I am expecting few more changes over the months to come and i would like to hear the feed back from the people those who have used this tag.