Canonical URL's
The Canonical URL Meta Tag revealed on Friday, February 20th 2009 is a new Meta Tag announced by Google, MSN, and Yahoo that will deal with some complicated duplicate content issues. This new tag, added to the <head> section of your HTML document will tell search engines exactly what URL you would like this page to be indexed as. Meaning if you have a long URL, or a URL containing parameters you can have it indexed as the URL you specify in the Canonical Meta Tag, rather than having it indexed more than once as different URL's. You can also use this to eliminate Google and other search engines from indexing your page URL's with or without the leading www. It will, for all intents and purposes, be treated as a 301 Redirect.
