Is it redundant to include a redirect to my canonical domain (www) in my .htaccess file since I already have the correct rel="canonical" in my header?

[HOPdigital]

I've been reading the benefits of each practice, but not found anyone mentioning whether it's really necessary to do both? Personally I try to stay clear of .htaccess rewrites unless it's absolutely necessary, since because I've read they can slow down a website.

[jesse-landry]

No it is not redundant as they are essentially two different things. You absolutely  need to do redirect in htaccess via 301.

Canonical tags are used for duplicate content, not redirection. Google does not consider the canonical tag a directive but instead choose it to be a "helpful hint." If you have two pages at entirely different URLs with the majority of the content identical, that is when you need that Canonical tag.

For non-www to www issues, you really need to use a 301 redirect. Don't feel nervous about doing so. Every site does. Or at least, every site worth a darn does.

[ThompsonPaul]

It would take a helluva lot of .htaccess rules to noticeably slow down a site, HOP. (We're talking many hundreds at least, if not more.)

The 301 redirect is a vastly stronger signal to the search engines than the canonical - which even Google says is treated as a "suggestion" not a directive.

The other huge benefit of the 301 is it standardises the URL all visitors will see in their address bar, so when they copy/paste to create a link (for example) they're always getting the canonical version.

Even though it's now considered that a 301 doesn't lose much juice (at least in Google, no word from Bing), I still much prefer that as many of my visitors are linking directly to the canonical version as possible. This is vastly more likely with the 301 consolidating the address that is visible.

So to me, using the 301 is essential. Adding the canonical is proactive to deal with other possibilities like unexpected variables getting added by outside sources for example, or even just Analytics utm tracking tags.

Make sense?

Paul

[jesse-landry]

I'd like to just add that a 301 redirect passes the same amount of page rank as a regular link would.

Pretty much there's no reason not to use a 301 in your htaccess. Go for it!