Google and Yahoo Make Surprising Search Announcements

At the  Search Marketing Expo in New York earlier this week, search engines Google and Yahoo made a couple of shocking revelations. The first announcement pertains to the canonical tag, which is a collaborative effort from the engines.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing, and later Ask, all joined together to allow users to dictate which of the duplicate pages on their site they want the search engines to list. While users find the tag useful for internal purposes, users have been asking for an external solution for many years. Users want to be able to control which page is listed across multiple domains as well.

It looks like users won't have wait much longer according to a "premature announcement" from a Google representative. Google will reportedly support an external solution by the end of the year.

The second surprise announcement comes from Yahoo and is in regards to the meta keywords tag. In the past, Google and Bing have not supported it, but Yahoo has. However, Yahoo announced that the search company had actually stopped supporting the tag several months ago. In other words, the meta keywords tool is dead for all SEO purposes.

These announcements were not only a surprise to users, but they were also a surprise to the other search engines. It will be interesting to see if the other engines do anything to respond.

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