rel=canonical part two

Google today officially announced support for cross-domain rel=canonicals.  This is a very important step.  I talked about rel=canonical when we announced it 10 months ago.  This tweak will be very useful in a variety of cases.  A few interesting ones:

1. Any place where you want to move your site to a new domain but can't control server headers.  This can be really useful to help avoid lock in on free hosts for example.
2. Companies that register several domain names as landing pages for offline advertising, a practice often used for tracking performance of the campaign, can now keep users on the original domain but keep spiders going to the right place so Google doesn't end up with 10 copies of the site.
3. Syndicating content - if your syndication partner agrees - you can now make sure that your "link juice" flows back to the original article in Google.

I think we'll see lots of creative uses of this tweak in the future as we've seen with the original rel=canonical.  Let's just hope those creative talents are used for the power of good.

Favorite Google Doodle: A fun chrome extension

Google announced extensions for Chrome Web Browser today, a much awaited feature for many. Go try out a few. If you are looking for recommendations, one quirky fun little extension that I would recommend is the Favorite Google Doodle Extension. It lets you select your favorite Google Doodle logo from Google's doodling history and set it as the logo for your Google search page whenever Google isn't running a special logo for that day:

Unfortunately, today isn't the best day since Google is actually running a special logo today celebrating the cartoonist E.C. Sagar, the man behind Popeye the Sailor.  However, if you install and choose a logo today, you'll see it on the search results page, and likely tomorrow (depending on whether or not there is a special logo running then too).  I've set might to be this fancy scientific logo for now.  I found some other of my favorites too:

• July 10, 2009
• Sep 10, 2008
• Dec 12, 2006
• Jan 4, 2006
• Oct 4, 2004
• Feb 3, 2004

I will admit that I'm undeniably biased as a friend of mine actually wrote this extension.  If you like it, don't forget to rate it too.