"Canonical Issue" and 301 Redirecting?

Question

Hi.
A SEO optimisation company has pointed out that our site
doesn't have a 301
Redirect which they state is required to avoid a "canonical
issue" with the
http://domain.com and
http://www.domain.com addresses
for our site. Out
host allows both to act as the address for the site but the
SEO company are
suggesting that this could lead to "duplicate penalties" with
Google?
I've never heard of this, can anyone shed any light on it, or
confirm/contest what the SEO are telling us?
If it is so bad, why is our host allowing it?
Thanks
Regards
Nath

Answer 1

Michael, will a .htaccess file work on a Windows server?
If not, is there a Windows alternative? I've uploaded the
following
.htaccess file to my Windows server but my SEO is still
telling me that
there is a problem:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain\.co.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*
http://www.domain.co.uk
[L,R=301]
</IfModule>
Appreciate the assistance, thanks.
Nath.
"Michael Fesser" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]..
> .oO(gareth)
>
>>At the worst, the search engines can see it as two
different sites, ie
>>with
>>the same content at two different addresses, and will
slap a duplicate
>>content penalty on you. Doesn't happen to everyone,
but can happen.
>
> And it can become even worse if you don't watch your
links:
>
>
http://example.com/
>
http://www.example.com/
>
http://example.com/index.html
>
http://www.example.com/index.html
>
> Four different URLs, but in fact (usually) the same
resource. For SEO
> and cache-friendlyness that's a really bad thing.
>
>>The solution is to either change the httpd.conf file
(for apache) to do a
>>permanent redirect from domainname.com to
www.domainname, or if you don't
>>have access to your server configuration, create a
.htaccess file in the
>>root directory of your site containing:
>
> Personally I prefer the version without the leading
'www' (for nicer,
> shorter URLs), but YMMV.
>
>><IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
>>RewriteEngine on
>>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com$ [NC]
>>RewriteRule .*
http://example.com/ [L,R=301]
>></IfModule>
>
> Just for the records my general version, also taking
into account the
> URL path, not only the host name:
>
> RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$
> RewriteRule (.*)
http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
>
> So
>
>
http://www.example.com/foo/bar
will become
http://example.com/foo/bar
>
> Micha