Canonical url question

[constructionhelpline]

i just search seomoz tooll

it say duplicate content for

www.mysite.com

and

www.mysite.com/index.php

should i use canonical url for this ?

is yes then

is this right ?

[danatanseo]

This is a great question. Yes, you should use a canonical tag. But, I would suggest that your canonical tag needs to be:

Notice the addition of the '/"

THe, I would also make sure that these URLs produce 301 status codes when going through your server:

http://www.mysite.com

http://mysite.com

http://mysite.com/

This is very important so as not to fragment your link profile and also not to produce massive amounts (potentially) of duplicate content in Google and other search engines.

Hope that helps!

Dana

[SEOAndy]

In addition to those 301 rules stick this in your htacess file

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html site-down.php

it tells the browser and bots which page is the default for your folders and root.

Also ensure your non-www forward to www. using this code

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

[constructionhelpline]

now another question about /

for this page

www.mysite.com/subpage.php

0r

[MoosaHemani]

I mean canonical is not a bad idea but my suggestion was to use 301 redirection from all different forms of domain URL to your prefered version so that all juice that you have on different URLs can transfer to the preferred version and at the same time visitors also redirect to the URL version you want....

[SEOAndy]

no trailing slash where you've got say .php or .html at the end

[SEOAndy]

thats why i said the bit about using non-www in htaccess too

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, I think canonical is fine for "index.php" variants. One important addition, though. Check your internal link structure. Many sites link to "index.php" via their "Home" link or logo. I'd suggest changing that to an absolute URL or just "/". That way, you're not creating the non-canonical version in the first place.