Canonicalisation - Best Approach?

[ocelot]

Hi

I have been reading into canonicalisation and I am looking for professional advice and guidance on the best approach as there are many conflicting views on how to implement a solution.

I have added to the homepage

http://www.cheapfindergames.com/" />

so that http://cheapfindergames.com and index.php redirects to the www version.

Or would it be better using .htaccess if this is the case what code would be needed to achieve the above?

Many Thanks

[RobertFisher]

If what you are trying to achieve is to have a canonical that is the www version, you are better served doing two things: First go to Google webmaster tools and select a preferred domain (from GWMT):

To specify your preferred domain:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.

You may need to reverify ownership of your sites. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you've removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you'll need to repeat the verification steps.

Note: Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.

To do the 301 redirect of the non www to the www here is the script from Scriptalicious:

**RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]**

Hope this helps you.