Canonical Meta Tag

[TheGrid]

Can someone explain how this works and how necessary is it? For example, I have a new client, who is ranking WITHOUT the www in their domain, but they have a good deal of backlinks already that have www in it. When I set up google webmaster tools I made 2, one for WWW and one for WITHOUT and there are diffenet numbers of backlinks for each. I have no idea what do about this or if I should even do anything.

Thanks

[gmk1567]

301 redirect the non www version to WWW version to consolidate links.

Also check if there are pages like www.example.com/index.html and www.example.com. These pages also need to be taken care of in the same way.

[irvingw]

Correct, if you 301 the non www to the www that takes care of the split PR issue, you can also declare which version non www or www to select in google WMT so do that as well.

As far as the canonical goes, that helps to make sure that Google ranks the page you want instead of a similar inferior page and helps make sure your Google index stays clean, so it's a good idea to canonical every page to help avoid Google getting confused.

[Paul53]

What's the easiest way to do a 301 redirect, do you add code to the htaccess file?

What code is needed?

Many thanks

[TheGrid]

Yes, how do you do this? I am ok with HTML but when it comes to server-side and whatnot, I am lost.