This is going to be a short post just pointing out a new change recently with the Google algorithm.

But first I wanted to mention an update on my last post about Google Buzz. There were a lot of concerns about some of the privacy settings and how your information was being used. Google has made various updates and they mention the changes on their blog. Enough said.

A few days ago on the official Google blog they made a post about how webmasters and web site owners could specify your canonical. One of the biggest concerns for anyone that does SEO is that of duplicate content on their website. Now that Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing) are going to start supporting the rel=”canonical” tag in the header it makes it easy for Google and the others to slap your website around if you have duplicate content.

For those that aren’t sure what I am referring to here is an example:

• http://micaljohnson.com
• http://www.micaljohnson.com
• http://micaljohnson.com/index.htm

All this links point to the same page and would cause a duplicate content penalty to be served. This is a very simple example. I’ll share more in a moment.

Those of us that use WordPress blogs should be familiar with this because of the way the link structure of the blog works we often times end up with duplicate content. Thankfully the genius wordpress plugin creator Joost de Valk at Yoast.com made a great wordpress plugin to canonical your blog and help eliminate that problem.

Here are a few places to check out to get up to speed on this:

• Yoast.com: Canonical URL links
• Google Blog: About rel=”canonical”

Here is also a video of Google’s Matt Cutts explaining it a little better