SearchStatus 1.30 has just been released, and the big change is that you can now use it to detect and view canonical link tags.

These tags are invisible markers placed on the page to indicate the preferred URL for the content you are currently viewing. They were first supported by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft earlier in the year, and promise to help eradicate the duplicate content issues that plague the Web. In fact, we’ve already found them pretty useful to solve a number of our client’s indexing problems.

Without any further waffle, here are the updates in this release:

1. The Canonical Link tag is now supported! If you browse to a page with a canonical link tag, a round ‘C’ icon will be displayed in the location bar (next to the favourites star on the right). Hovering over this icon will display a tooltip with the canonical link, and clicking on the icon will navigate to that link. If a canonical link is found on the page which matches the current location, the icon is displayed as disabled with an appropriate tooltip.

2. In the Meta Tags tool (right-click on the 'q' in the bar), character counts for all meta tags on the page are shown alongside their values so you can determine whether your title or description will be truncated in the SERPS. (Titles should generally be kept to 70 characters or less, and descriptions between 140-200 characters).

3. Yahoo and Yahoo Site Explorer have been differentiated in the Backward Links menu options (right-click on the 'q'). Normal Yahoo search has been re-added for those backward link searches where the current domain should be excluded as this can display more accurate results. MS Live has been removed as retrieving backward links has been impossible on this engine for some time.

4. Indexed pages and backward links from Google now show 100 results per page.

5. Private Browsing: this is a new feature introduced in the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.5, which when activated will allow you to browse without cookies, urls, or any history to be stored. Activating private browsing in Firefox turns on Private Mode in SearchStatus (introduced in the previous release), where rankings are only obtained if you click on the ranking bar or on the ‘q’.

6. Nofollow highlighting, a favourite SearchStatus feature, now uses the CSS 'outline' rather than 'border' style to avoid affecting the layout of the page on which it is displayed.

7. Firefox 3.5 is supported, including all the betas for those on the bleeding edge.

8. Bug fix: when using Windows in Private Mode, right-clicking on the bar does not cause the ranking to be retrieved.

9. Bug fix: SearchStatus now handles https requests better.

To update your version go to Tools -> Add-ons -> Find Updates, or go to http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus to install the latest version.

If you have any suggestions or requests, please let us know.