You’re right of course, but at the end of the day that’s irrelevant. The bottom line is that if you don’t avoid what Google considers to be duplicate content, your site will suffer.

I just get mighty suspicious at anything that forces one group of people to take responsibility for another group of people’s problems, and in essence that’s what we have here. It’s all very well for google to play the “let’s all pull together for the good of the internet” card, but we know perfectly well that google isn’t concerned with the good of the internet, it’s concerned with its own interests, which may or may not co-incide.

I just need someone else to write a WP Plugin to do this :)

So Google now wants us to take responsibility for their inability to tell the difference between natural duplication and spamming? They expect us to provide the manpower that they’re not prepared to?

That seems like a bit of an overreaction!
Through accidents of history and changing practices, most pages on my website have multiple URLs. In some cases, it’s because there are links from outside that have www. on them (although no internal links do), in many cases it’s because Google uses the old .htm extension rather than the current canonical .shtml extension, and in some cases it is because the page has been renamed. The old links always send users to the right page, but it would be very useful to be able to set a definitive link on each page so that Google is referencing the correct URL – that will help users, by ensuring that SERPs are not duplicated, and it will help me when analysing my logs.

It is also very handy for anyone whose site generates print-friendly or text-only pages to ensure that search engines don’t send users to these pages, which won’t be as helpful for them as the ‘proper’ version of the page.

I welcome this move – it is very little effort for web designers, and if it improves the way the search engine understands your website, what’s the problem with that?

However, you and your clients need a good position in search results.

Yes, I don’t think too many clients are going to support you taking a moral stand if no-one visits their site because they’ve been penalised.

The canonical element could certainly help when you publish two or more versions of the same article, e.g. a normal version, a text-only version, and a mobile version. Whether Google realise those pages are inexact replicas is another matter.

Does Google have too much power? Probably. Is the search engine broken? Nothing is ever perfect. However, you and your clients need a good position in search results. It’s difficult to ignore a known indexing problem especially when a workaround is available.

This reminds me of the brief hysteria that arose around content designed for screenreaders – content that is invisible to screen users using offleft positioning, but still there in the source so that screenreaders hear it. To some this was a great concern that google would view it as spamming. And my reply to that was the same as to this – that’s google’s problem, not mine. If google penalises me for doing this then google is broken; period.

Any company that would expect us to take this seriously has way, way to much power.