What is a canonical redirect? For my web site the Canonical URL is http://webdesign-ri.com and this is the primary address for my domain and the address http://www.webdesign-ri.com is considered a different address unless we instruct the server to ‘join-the-dots’ and this process is called a canonical redirect. We use what is called a permanent 301 redirect a method of pointing www.webdesign-ri.com to webdesign-ri.com ( and all pages on the site) such that it is transparent to the user. To see it in action type in www.webdesign-ri.com and you will see webdesign-ri.com appear in the address bar.

To execute a canonical redirect on an Apache server, we must add  a little  code to the .htaccess file. The code below is the actual code from my .htaccess file, to adapt this for your web site simply swap out my domain for yours.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^webdesign-ri\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://webdesign-ri.com/$1 [R=301,L]

.htaccess, canonical redirect Hide

When you make a changes to your web site, the live version often gets out of synch. with the cached version of your site which resides on Google. When the Googlebots crawl a site they store a record, a snapshot in time, into a cache file.In the example above, from an organic Google search, there is a link to the cached copy, now if the link no longer exists the person browsing will be faced with a 404 error ( and not everyone creates a custom 404 page ) and this will also show up as a dead link which may impact your SEO performance.

There is a solution at hand – Google’s URL removal tool, which is part of the Webmaster Tools suite. Simply enter the name of the dead URL and Google will remove it..the process does take a few days but it is a great way of keeping your cached version of your site clean to both give your browsers a more pleasurable viewing experience and assists to optimize your site.

Google cache, remove URL Hide