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Canonical tag particularly useful in cases such as e-commerce where session ID's, filters and such sorts or other parameters cause duplicate content that you can't redirect without fudging something functionality wise. The canonical tag indicates what should be the 'primary' page to search engines.

Something I've seen happen quite a lot, especially on CMS' and E-Commerce packages is sticking in the canonical tag on the template. This will make the canonical tag site-wide but using the same URL rather than being applicable to individual pages. You may notice a drop in the number of your pages indexed if you happen to do this!

Remember though, in many instances you may not need the canonical tag. A 301 may be a better choice depending on the circumstances.

Hi Rallport - long time no speak!

Correct about the xml.gz compression. We're talking well over 50,000 URLs here. So I wanted to know if there is software available (or equivalent, anything that solves the issue) that can compress 50k URLs and more automatically. It then needs to be able to recognise new pages and page deletion and adjust the sitemap.xml appropriately.

Any ideas are welcome!

Thanks Sogo7 for the input, yes, getting them indexed is a different matter.

Regarding your other post unfortunately Rallport, it's not always that simple. It's good practice to provide an XML sitemap and especially in the case of much larger sites, it can help increase search visibility and provides another way to specify canonical URLs.

Cheers again! Any help on the sitemap front will be useful!