You won't DARE post THIS on the FORUM!

[TWD-Tony]

Originally Posted by Megahertz

I might be stupid here.... what are 'canonical issues'?

Sorry if this is a daft question!

Basically it's when your website reponds to both http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com - which is bad because (believe it or not) the search engines treat these 2 addresses as 2 seperate websites.
What this then means is Google thinks "hang on a minute... Here are 2 website's with identical pages - one must have copied the other one"
It also means that you could have links to your website going to either / both website's so you are diluting the number of inbound links that you have.

To fix this you need to open notepad and copy 'n paste the following:

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

Replacing yourdomainname with your domain name obviously...

You then need to save this as a file called .htaccess (yes there is a full stop and nothing before it) and then upload it to the root of your website - where your website files and folders are.

If you already have a .htaccess file you will need to add the code above to it.

What this .htaccess file does is say to Google "Sorry but the content of the website http://yourwebsite.com has been moved permanently to http://www.yourwebsite.com - have a nice day "

[zeemax]

Interesting and contradicting tile to get people to your post - must jot this down as a good method to attract people to posts that I may put on here in the future,

Hope you don't mind me taking notes.

All the best!!!