Do I need both canonical meta tags AND 301 redirects?

[spkcp111]

I implemented a 301 redirect set to the "www" version in the .htaccess (apache server)  file and my logs are DOWN 30-40%! I have to be doing something wrong!

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm

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

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm
RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L]

IndexIgnore *
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.luckygemstones.com/page-not-found.htm
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.luckygemstones.com/internal-serv-error.htm
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.luckygemstones.com/forbidden-request.htm
ErrorDocument 401 http://www.luckygemstones.com/not-authorized.htm

I've also started adding canoncial META's to EACH page:

I'm using HMTL 4.0 loose still--1000's of pages--painful to convert to HTML5 so I left the / off the tag so it would validate.

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks, Kathleen

[ThompsonPaul]

Using the 301 redirect is the right and necessary thing to do, even if you are using canonical tags, Kathleen. They serve somewhat the same purpose on the home page, but the 301 is vastly more powerful to communicate to the search engines that the www version is your primary page.

You've got a bit of a problem with the canonical tag as you've listed ti though.

By doing the redirect, the canonical version of your home page is now www.luckygemstones.com  But your canonical tag is declaring www.luckygemstones.com/index.htm which directly contradicts what you set above. For your home page, it should be

In addition, http://www.luckygemstones.com/index.htm should also be 301-redirecting to http://www.luckygemstones.com (another example of a different URL that applies to the same page). The htaccess you list has that redirect in place, but it doesn't seem to be working on the site - is that htaccess actually live as is?

Paul

[spkcp111]

Here's the entire contents of my .htaccess file:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm

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

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.htm
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.htm$ http://www.luckygemstones.com/$1 [R=301,L]

**IndexIgnore ***
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.luckygemstones.com/page-not-found.htm
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.luckygemstones.com/internal-serv-error.htm
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.luckygemstones.com/forbidden-request.htm
ErrorDocument 401 http://www.luckygemstones.com/not-authorized.htm

Frankly, I'm not sure what all the flags on the Rewrite lines mean. I know when I updated the index.htm code I lost serious traffic--but without it I seem to have dup content issues. I would just LOVE to be done w/this once and for all--to know it's right would be huge!

Here's the canonical tag in the index.htm file:

Is anything amiss? I will say I had no dup content issues in this week's seomoz run but the loss of traffic means google isn't liking something...

Thanks for your help, Kathleen

[Dr-Pete]

I wouldn't use both 301s and rel=canonicals for the same purpose. It's fine to have 301s to redirect non-www URLs, and then canonicals for other problems, but I wouldn't double them up for the same issue. The 301s are the proper solution here.

Your 301s don't seem to be triggering. Did you remove this code? Unfortunately, diagnosing someone's rewrites in .htaccess is incredibly difficult without direct access.

How does Google crawl your site? It looks like all of the products are only available by submitting a form (pulldowns). Google can't take that action, which could be causing major problems with your PageRank flow internally. You need paths that Google can use to reach the actual products. Honestly, form selects menus aren't typically a good solution for users, either.