Canonical Tag is Cross-Domain now

Duplicate Content may no longer be a plight for Google. For those of you who don't know what the canonical tag is (and you can't rightly call yourself a learned SEO if you don't), here's the dirty on that. Go ahead and read it, I'll wait.

Well so that's all well and good, and definitely helpful for the various ways people look at content. But what happens if you or your well-intentioned-yet-poorly-executed mess of domains has duplicate content across the board? Unfortunately, the canonical tag did not apply to those sites that had content living on different domains (verses being redirected to a unified location). Things like www.company.com, www.companyinfo.com and companydataforpeoplewholikelongdomains.com wherein all domains have essentially the same exact content in multiple instances are still out of luck.

Well yesterday Google announced that the canonical tag can now be used across multiple domains. So we (the webmaster) can now tell engines which content is duplicate and which is original source so results are indexed properly. The canonical tag has been a godsend for massive catalog sites with many different ways (and URLs) for viewing the same content. This is a logical extension of that paradigm. Granted there wouldn't be an issue of people having the exact same content across domains if they like, you know, had thought this out to begin with. *le sigh*