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What is a canonical URL?
If you already know you would be surprised at how few webmasters have ever heard of a canonical URL. If you also spend time in Google Groups you will find people scratching their heads and not getting a clear answer as to how to troubleshoot and resolve this troublesome issue in Google.
Here is a previous post to help you set your preferred domain in Google.
If you have a Wordpress blog read my new post on webmaster404.com titled (with extreme ego): Two plugins for preferred domain mastery
Here is an old link that helped me set a 301 to my preferred domain on a regular website years ago. If you do not have a Wordpress blog add (cut and paste) the code below to a file named .htaccess.
For a domain that starts with “www”:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
For a domain that starts without “www”:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Visit the above three links to help you resolve the canonical URL once and for all.
