Google, Yahooo and Microsoft announced support for a new element that can be defined in the html head structure to avoid page duplication problems.  Any page can define an element like the following to indicate which is the real page(canonical page) the search engine should take in consideration:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/page.html”/>

The above element can be defined in pages like http://example.com/page.html?item=546345634 and has a similar effect with a 301 redirect, and can be used to indicate canonical pages inside the same domain. It can not be used to defined a canonical page ouside of current domains, but can define one in another subdomain of the same domain.

You can take a look on the following presentation.

Source: Matt Cuts Blog.

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