Rel="canonical" and rewrite

[webtarget]

Hi,

I'm going to describe a scenario on one of my sites, I was wondering if someone could tell me what is the correct use of rel="canonical" here.

Suppose I have a rewrite rule that has a rule like this:

RewriteRule ^Online-Games /main/index.php

So, in the index file, do I set the rel="canonical" to Online-Games or /main/index.php?

Thanks.

[Highland]

None of the above. If you have a .htaccess file, you need to 301 /main/index.php to OnlineGames. Another option is to tell index.php it can only be called as OnlineGames, or 301 to that directory. The reason is you're pretending that index.php is a directory. You don't want to waste the time of bots crawling the same page twice so just 301 it. You remove the issue entirely and save your crawl budget.

[marcinlejman]

Your example is not a case where you would use canonical links.

Canonical links are useful when you have several pages which are accessible vial individual URLs and do not redirect to a single page, yet they have very similar content.

A great example is a category page in an online store. Quite often, you will find various sorting methods, like price, popularity, etc. These various sorting methods usually add a parameter to the URL, something like "order=price". Yet, the content remains largely the same.

In cases such as above, the different pages should have a canonical reference to the main page.

In your case, you simply need a 301 redirect, that's all.

[webtarget]

Great, thanks a lot!