Redirect non-www if using canonical url?

[blakadz]

I have setup my website to use canonical urls on each page to point to the page i wish Google to refer to.

At the moment, my non-www domain name is not redirected to www domain. Is this required if i have setup the canonical urls?

This is the tag i have on my index.php page

rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com.au" />

If i browse to http://mydomain.com.au should the link juice pass to http://www.armourbackups.com.au?

Will this solve duplicate content problems?

Thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

A canonical is kind of like a last resort if a redirect can't be used - and best applies to handling campaign URL parameters and session IDs etc. You really ought to redirect all possible variations of the homepage to one singular URL no matter what. This way people will only link to one version of it (or at least be more likely to).

-Dan

[RobertFisher]

Dan is correct and the biggest reason to redirect the www to non www or non www to www is that the chance will always exist that they will be seen as two sites and by virtue of that you will split the value of the site. We see it every day when we take on new clients.  While the DA is the same on both, the PA for a home page or important other ranking page is different. One I just finished sending a proposal on has a DA of 23 for the site. The www version home page has a PA of 32 while the non www version has a PA of 21. There are four links on the non www that do not exist on the www.

So, your call, Dan is right.

Best