Google has added a new way for webmasters to tell it which parameters in URLS, they wish to be ignored. They have added a new feature to Google Webmaster Tools called simply, "Parameter Handling." Google provides the following explanation with the feature:

While Google’s Matt Cutts has certainly provided a wealth of helpful tips via the company’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel, he is not the only one to do so.

If you’re responsible for a handful of blogs or sites, and have been wearing holes in a thesaurus to avoid using the same phrase twice, rest easy.  At SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts said some things about duplicate content that should comfort the average blogger or small business owner.

The SMX Confernece was in Sydney Australia last week, and one topic discussed by representatives of both Google and Yahoo was that of duplicate content filtering across international domains. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz notes that while the subject has been discussed in the past, many people including experts in the field have been in the dark.