Set up a rel canonical

[PeterRota]

I have a question. I was wondering, if it was possible to set up a rel canonical. When I can't access the non canonical pages? For example, my site as at www.site.com , but the non cannocail is at site.com is their any way to set thet up without actually edting it at site.com ? Thanks for your help

[FedeEinhorn]

If there's no way to access site.com why will you set a canonical?

If, for example, your sites serves the same content on site.com and www.site.com what you need is a "global" 301 redirect from site.com to www.site.com to avoid duplicate issues. As the file is the same in both domains, a canonical would help, but not appropriate in that case.

Is that what you need?

[MattAntonino]

I'm confused. Assuming your site is at www.site.com and site.com, the duplicate is coming from a file, usually index.html or index.php, yes?  But it's the same index.html file.  So if you setup rel=canonical in index.html, both site.com and www.site.com will have a canonical on it.

(Or I'm missing something.)

[PeterRota]

Hi Matt,

Yes the duplicate is coming from index.html . So, when you click back to the homepage it goes to that. How would you suggest I get rid of that? Thanks for your help.

[MattAntonino]

site.com and site.com/index.html are both loading index.html  So open Index.html, add the canonical tag back to your preferred version and you're done.

If you're saying that you want the link to be something different, that depends on how the site is setup, whether you can change the "home" button or whatnot. In Wordpress's new menus this is simple. In other themes, not so much. In other CMS, I don't know because "it depends."