The canonical tag - Goodbye ranking affiliate links
 

While the new canonical tag that will work for google, yahoo and msn certainly has some neat advantages to avoid duplicate content for bloggers and many script based sites, it's has an ugly side, too.

I'd bet most sponsors will put it up quickly, meaning even search engine friendly sponsor URLs with affiliate IDs will disappear from the SERPs and all those links will only count towards the power of the defined canonical URL, one without any affiliate ID. Noindex on crack.

Damn, I loved those lucky shots, but it seems like the party is over soon.

that is some big news, wonder how it can be abused and subtly shifting juice around, I noticed that it said that it works within subdomains as well

i would suspect most sponsors wont bother to implement this to gain no ref rankings.

For the following reasons.

Most sponsors dont put a whole lot of work into the "serpiness" of their pages anyways or seo in general.

Some sponsor might understand the guts behind se and realise if they do affiliates will stop hardlinking anyways so it doesnt relly help them.

Yep. Check out the video link on my twitter feed http://twitter.com/websitewriters

So the canonical tag works over sub-domains? I'm thinking thumblogger,blogger etc :Graucho