Google ads canonical support

[Eric Barnes]

Here is a post I found today that I thought some of you would be interested in:
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify your canonical

[bowers01]

Awsome, thanks for sharing.
Nick

[Eric Barnes]

Here is another post about this:
SEOmoz | Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

[seymourjames]

I read the article (interesting) but I cannot see the real advantages of this new tag except it is less terse than doing rewrites and redirects. I must be missing something and stuck in the old paradigm. It is just as quick to rewrite the urls to how they should be. Hard coded into a site or by using .htaccess to rewrite urls. For example just this little bit of code in .htaccess will do the following and save a whole lot of problems.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

#rewrite index.php to root

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/ [R=permanent,L]

#rewrite all non www on your domain.com pages to www.yourdomain.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com$
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.tmydomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=permanent,L,NC]

</IfModule>