Canonicalization

[Yozzer]

Having been a member of SEOmoz Pro tools for only a couple of months, I'm now at a point where there are certain issues with our recently overhauled site:

On my latest "Open Site Explorer Report" I am seeing a number of external links going to the HTTP://Domainname.com  and a number pointing at HTTP://wwwDomainname.com.

This only appears when I pull the report from the Root Domain. If I pull a report from the Sub-domain all URL's are the same.

Does this matter too much?

Would best practice be to put a rel=canonical on the Non www ?

Thanks for any help in advance

Sean

[ThomasHgenhaven]

The Rel canonical tag is always a good thing to implement. My preferred solution is to do a .htaccess 301 redirect from non-www to www by this code:

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

By doing the 301, all users are sent to www url. This means all future links to your site will be to the same URL. Hereby, you avoid the small link juice loss which occurs whenever you use the rel cnonical url to direct from non-www to www (or the other way around).

[Yozzer]

Wow, Thanks Thomas. I wasn't quite expecting such a thorough and precise answer so quickly.

Many Thanks for your expertise, greatly appreciated

Sean

[ThomasHgenhaven]

Well, thats what this q&a is for, isn't it?

Glad I could help