I’m slightly surprised, but both Google and Yahoo decided to tell webmasters how they can prevent onsite duplicate content issues. Both sites published the posts about 15 minutes apart; perhaps this was discussed at SMX.
From Yahoo! search blog:
To do this, specify a <link> tag in the <head> section of your page content:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/products” />
The above tag indicates to the crawler that the URL it is present on should be represented canonically as http://www.example.com/products. This would eliminate the following duplicates:
http://example.com/products?trackingid=feed
http://example.com/products?sessionid=hgjkeor2
http://example.com/products?printable=yes&trackingid=footer
I don’t think is necessarily a bad idea, but it just shows you how they are not confident in their own algorithms at detecting which are the authority-pages on your site.
PS: This could be a quick way to boost any pages that you want higher in the SERPs. Imagine taking all of my category pages of this blog, and directing them all to each of their corresponding top articles. I may test this out; it would just be a shame if I got this white hat blog penalized. 
5 Comments
I notice that you made a comment on this blog post about a script to find abandoned sites in Dmoz.org:
http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/tools/sitefinder301/#comment-4380
I tried downloading the sitefinder301 script from the site; but the link is broken.
If you have a copy of this script or know where I can download it; would you mind sending me a copy?
Yeah, I have it – I’ll email it to you.
Update: I tried sending it but your email is invalid.
Ok! I fixed the email. Please try to send it again.
BTW, the download link has been fixed:
http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/tools/sitefinder301/#comment-5868
I know this is a long shot, but would you happen to still have the Sitefinder301 script? It is no longer supported or available for download but I’d really love to check it out. If at all possible, you can send it to the email I’ve provided. Thanks!