Google recently announced a breakthrough for webmasters regarding the use of Canonical Http Headers. While this may not mean much to most, this is going to quell duplicity ( the woes of duplicate content) in large websites with one simple meta command instead of having to resort to drastic measures such as using 301 redirects to minimize or manage content duplication across categories, tags or, content types or folders.
Google Supports Rel="Canonical" Http Headers
With this simple command, you can indicate the preferred URL to Google and minimize the suppression or devaluation of multiple pages fighting in the index for the same topic. You can read more at Google Webmaster Central for the official post. You can read about their previous update in 2009 regarding canonical URL support here.Naturally, we have already considered how to integrate this into SEO Ultimate and WP Ultimate Theme and intend to weave this feature into the code after we perform some testing.
I think I know what is meant by canonical URL. Nonetheless, I don’t know how it truly affects a site in terms of ranking.
I have read your mention of the fact that several pages can be competing for the same topic but will google better rank one page because other pages, about the same topic, from the same domain are not there?