Finally some seo development. Big 3 (Google, Yahoo and Live) will soon be using rel=”canonical” tags in order to manage duplicate content on your domain name. The tag will be used in the header of your page next to meta tags. For example <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.exposedseo.com/wahtever.php”> will tell search engines that the page is a copy of http://www.exposedseo.com/wahtever.php. Fore more uses and information have a look at the original SEOmoz article. I don’t know when but I’m sure there will be a way to exploit this little tag soon.

It has recently been proven that duplicate content penalty only exists when the content is being duplicated on the same domain. Could this be an attempt to help webmasters sort this out? rel=”canonical” tag is said to replace 301 redirects which will make things much easier. Not only that, rel=”canonical” is only there for the spiders which means that the duplicate page will still be there for your visitors and won’t redirect to the original. Meanwhile, we just have to wait and see.

Google recommends you submit your website to two specific directories.

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

As you probably know Dmoz is a joke and you are more likely to win a lottery than get accepted. Yahoo on the other hand is great but freaking expensive! $300/year! (To be honest its well worth it in some cases) Basically there are free submissions but strictly for none commercial or charity websites. Little birdy told me Canadian part of Yahoo directory however does not have a problem with commercial sites. In fact you can expect to get a listing after waiting for just 3 months. So go ahead and try you luck by submitting to ca.dir.yahoo.com. (Category/suggest a site/free) Whats the worst that could happen?