We’re excited to announce a pretty big new feature which will be live next week. We’ve been working with a few different API’s to bring in backlink data about any website. There aren’t that many sources for this information, and numbers from these sources can vary widely, which is why we decided to give you all of them, and let you choose which metric to look at. We’ve successfully incorporated data from Yahoo!, SEOmoz and MajesticSEO. We’re also pulling, in real-time, the latest blogs linking to any site. Here’s a preview of what you’ll see very soon.

We’ve used the Top Rank Blog as an example, and you’ll see from these numbers, they’ve done an impressive job of developing link worthy content. How does your blog compare? Next week you’ll be able to find out.

[click to enlarge]

The canonical tag is simply a way to silence webmasters.

Yesterday at SMX West it was announced that Google, Yahoo! and Live have agreed upon a method to help webmasters define original content within a site. The canonical tag is a meta tag used to tell search engines which page to list in SERPs when multiple listings of the same, or very similar content exist in their databases.

On-site duplicate content has been a big issue since the beginning of the web. There are lots of things that could cause search engine spiders to index the same content at multiple locations. URL canonical variations (http://www.exmaple.com vs. http://example.com) is the most common issues, but there are others. This is a good explanation of the canonical tag and how it’s implemented.

In september the Google Webmaster Central Blog published a fairly extensive post on how search engines handle on-site duplicate content in hopes of dispelling a lot of the rumors and speculation circling the issue. Despite how clear the article was, and all the other resources on the web, there were still LOTS of questions about the issue.

As new webmasters come into the space trying to understand SEO and mitigating duplicate content the easy thing to do is ask Google. If you’re site is set up correctly duplicate content shouldn’t be an issue. The canonical tag, is not the end-all be-all of duplicate content. You still need a sitemap, good URLs, redirection from the www or the non-www to the correct path, etc. This tag is simply an easy answer to the duplicate content question.

What do you think? Have you implimented the canonical tag yet? Is it really THAT important considering all the other things that still need to be done?