Many site owners have wanted the recently introduced canonical tag to work across domains. Now their wishes will come true. Google announced cross-domain support will come by the end of the year.

The news came out during the Duplicate Content: The Search Engines Edition session at SMX East conference today. Google made the announcement in response to site owners again voicing that they wanted such a solution.

The existing canonical tag is only supported by Google, at the moment. Yahoo and Bing both said they’re studying support but think its likely they’ll add support by the end of the year. However, they’ll only support canonicalization across the same domain.

In a way, they’ll support Canonical Tag 1.0 by the end of the year, while Google will be supporting Canonical Tag 2.0, with cross-domain support.

We will have more information when more details come to us.

About Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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