How big of a problem is this? - link cannonicalization I think?

[joebordersmft]

Hello! I'm new here. My moz Pro account is flagging my website for having 282 duplicate pages, which it is saying are critical issues. I looked at this and it seems like the problem is that many of my pages are being indexed like: www.joeborders.com and joeborders.com and oeborders.com/index. I think this is an issue with link cannonicalization...right? I contacted my website builder/host a while ago and they said they don't have a way to to link cannonicalization....is this a huge problem?...Is there some way to do it that I'm missing? Should i get a new website builder/host?

for reference, this is what my builder/host said when I asked them about it:

"Good question, at the moment we don't offer it, I will add it to our feature request list, as I think it would be a good idea. In a traditional hosting environment this would be using a htaccess file, since we are in ruby on rails environment we would need come up with a custom solution."

[joebordersmft]

....I feel like this might seem like a dumb question. I've read about link cannonicalization in the Moz articles, but I don't know how to do anything about site wide cannonicalization ie http://joeborders.com ---->www.joeborders.com when I don't have access to http://joeborders.com.

[LoganRay]

Hi there,

There's two things that should be done to fix this:

The first is that www and non-www versions should not both be available, one version should redirect to the other version. It doesn't matter which you choose, but in your case, Google already has www indexed, so I'd go with that. This will take care of the first two examples of dupes (www.joeborders.com vs. joeborders.com).

The  second is the canonical tag, assuming you go with the www version of your domain, your canonical tag would look like this: . This would take care of the /index issue.

You said this site was built using Ruby of Rails, that seems like overkill for a basic content site (unless there's more to it that I'm missing). You're probably overpaying for a solution that far too robust for what you need, so yes, you might consider searching for a new developer and hosting solution.

[joebordersmft]

Thanks for the response Logan ^_^. I've read through the articles on Moz about how to use the cannonicalization tag, my problem is that I dont seem to have access to "joeborders.com" (without the www.) to be able to add the tag there. What do you think? ...as far as I know there is no way to do anything about this...unless I redirect the www. version to the other....but I think that would be detrimental to my google rankings.

[joebordersmft]

Woot! I think I fixed this! Instead of using link cannonicalization I found out that I can to a site wide 301 redirect from the http:// version to the www. version. Does anybody think this is totally wrong? I researched in the Moz library for a while and I think this is an acceptable solution.

[Guest]

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[LoganRay]

Nice! This is exactly what the first part of my recommendation was.

[joebordersmft]

Lol. You're right. Sorry. I assumed you meant redirect through canonical links

[joebordersmft]

I'm using www.jigsy.com . It's pretty good, but there have been a few times when I've had to code my own html to get something to work