Subject: [link-relations] NEW RELATION REQUEST: canonical

From: Ed Summers <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:33:39 -0500

Relation Name:
canonical

Description:
A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with
highly similar content.

Reference:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Notes:
This relation is used by web crawlers to prefer a particular URI when
multiple URIs are available for similar content. For example, when a
URL contains a tracking number or sort parameters.

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 10:31:05 +0100

> URL contains a tracking number or sort parameters.

Hi Ed,

registering "canonical" would be a good thing, yes.

Questions:

1) are you doing this on behalf of Google, or as an individual?

2) Do we have confidence that the URI is stable (well, it uses 
rel=canonical to declare itself as canonical, but who knows :-)?

Best regards, Julian

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:03:52 +0100

> rel=canonical to declare itself as canonical, but who knows :-)?

Also,

maybe

<http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html>

is a better reference?

Best regards, Julian

---

From: Ed Summers <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 06:18:40 -0500

> <http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html>

Thanks Julian, I like that reference better. I'm definitely not doing
this on behalf of Google, I just thought I would suggest it for the
registry since it is being used. The discussion about 'duplicate'
reminded me of it :-)

//Ed

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From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 14:22:28 +1100

FWIW -- I discussed registering 'canonical' with someone from Google a while back. Let me see if I can get their take...

Cheers,

On 15/11/2010, at 10:18 PM, Ed Summers wrote:

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--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/