In a move that provides more control to webmasters to handle duplicate content, Google has introduced cross-domain canonical tag support.

The new cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element provides some hope for businesses that are not able to setup server-side redirects such as a permanent 301 redirect. Unfortunately though, the tag is still treated as a suggestion, so there’s no guarantee it will be followed.

If possible, we still recommend that you use a 301 redirect to tell search engine crawlers the preferred domain as it makes it very clear which URL should be indexed. As part of a strong migration strategy, a 301 redirect ensures that you leave nothing to chance.

Outside of moving your domain, the tag could also be used for content syndication to ensure that your own content does not get outranked by the sites you share it with.

Overall, it’s great to see Google providing this additional support and provides another tool in our arsenal to tell the search engines which domain to pay attention to.