WordPress and Magento plug-ins launched to support canonical tag

Those making use of WordPress or Magento hosting can now install plug-ins for both platforms that help to support a new HTML tag recently announced by the three major search engines.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are rolling out a new 'canonical' tag that helps webmasters to identify the URLs they want the search engines to focus on when it comes to sorting through website pages with duplicate content.

Developer Joost de Valk has come up with new plug-ins for WordPress and Magento that make it easier for website owners to implement the new link tag, admitting that he had a two-day head start on the announcement to produce the plug-ins.

"This isn't just useful for campaign tagging. Many a web shop needs the URL to store sort variables, for instance. But a page that's sorted by price ascending is often almost the same as a page sorted by price descending," he commented.

Google has said that it will "strongly" honour any URLs making use of the canonical tag.