nealrodriguez - 4:24 pm on Feb 25, 2009 (gmt 0)

A very laisser-faire attitude, a luxury enjoyed by those whose sites are naturally popular, enjoy other traffic streams, or don't NEED the leg-up from good SERP placement.

i wouldn't say 'naturally' popular because it still takes a considerable amount of effort to build your brand to the point that people will visit it by typing in the url in the address bar or clicking a feed. but i believe its something for which all webmasters should aim.

what if google were to tank tomorrow? or next year? it happened to some pretty big financial institutions last fall, so no company is immune to collapse.

i advocate leveraging every source of traffic, so in absence of more effective solutions - e.g. redirects - a canonical tag may help some challenged webmasters aggregate page/trust rank, link juice or whatever is required for more exposure on the search engines.