# Canonical Link Element: presentation from SMX West

> [!IMPORTANT]
> It's been a while since we published this blog post. Some of the information may be outdated (for example, some images may be missing, and some links may not work anymore).

Wednesday, February 25, 2009


A little while ago,
[Google](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/02/specify-your-canonical)
and other
[search](https://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-adding-more-arrows-to-your-quiver/)
[engines](https://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx)
announced support for a
[canonical link element that can help site owners with duplicate content issues](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls).
I recreated my presentation from
[SMX West](https://searchmarketingexpo.com/west)
and you can watch it below:
[Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM)


You can
[access the slides directly](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FpSpfd2sS3b3uoWdS7Pddss3XweQ4ncBltQCV_BY0v0)
or follow along here:
<iframe frame height="342" src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FpSpfd2sS3b3uoWdS7Pddss3XweQ4ncBltQCV_BY0v0/embed" width="410"></iframe>


By the way, Ask just announced that they will support the canonical link element. Read all about
it in the
[Ask.com blog entry](https://blog.ask.com/2009/02/ask-is-going-canonical).


Thanks again to [Wysz](https://www.thewysz.com/) for turning this
into a great video.


In fact, you might not have seen it, but we recently
[created a webmaster videos channel on YouTube](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/02/introducing-google-webmaster-central).
If you're interested, you can
[watch the new webmaster channel](https://www.youtube.com/c/GoogleSearchCentral).
If you subscribe to that channel, you'll always find out about new webmaster-related videos from
Google.

Posted by [Matt Cutts](https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/), Search Quality Team