Please take a look at my canonical tag - is it written right?

[kirupa]

Hi there! I just changed the preferred domain settings from http://example.com to http://www.example.com and received a recommended action from Google: "Ensure that you specify the new host as canonical in all page links or sitemaps."

Could you please let me know if "the new host" is equal to "canonical" and if I have to include this tag into every page of my website ?

Thank you!

[seanginnaw]

Hey Kirupa,

Short answer is that you're all good. The canonical is correct.

All the best,
Sean

[LoganRay]

Kirupa,

The syntax of your canonical tag is correct. However, there are a couple things you should know before you continue:

1- When Google says "Ensure that you specify the new host as canonical in all page links or sitemaps." it means they want to to update internal links and your XML sitemaps, so it's more involved than simply updating your canonical tag. Basically anywhere your URLs are referenced should be updated to reflect your new www-canonical URL structure.

2- You may have provided that one tag as an example, but DO NOT put that exact tag on every page of your site. Doing so would point search engines to the homepage of your site from any page they visit. Canonical tags are basically soft redirects that search engines follow, so when a bot sees a canonical tag on one page that points to another page, they leave and go to where the canonical is pointing them. Google will often de-index URLs that canonicalize to another URL, which I'm assuming you don't want

[kirupa]

Logan,

Thank you very much for your advise! I figured out that it is going to be much of work going from page to page and set their canonicals:) Maybe updating my .htaccess will work out? I am wondering if that (please see below) would be the right thing to put in there?

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Also, when I added the property (http://www.example.com) yesterday and set it as preferred domain, I was suggested to change the target country and submit a sitemap file for both http://example.com and http://www.example.com. I don't quite understand why do they want me to do that if the country and the sitemap are obviously the same?

[kirupa]

Thank you, Sean!

[LoganRay]

Unfortunately I'm not much of a coder, so I won't be able to guide you on the htaccess code piece. Regarding the Search Console items though, the tool treats every site that is setup as its own entity, which is why you need a country and XML for each. An example of why they do this because you might have different profiles for http://www.example.com/us and http://www.example.com/ca where the subfolder specifies the country. If they recycled the same info from each profile setup, the /ca site would be set to U.S. instead of Canada.

[kirupa]

Thank you!