Hi,

 

A website I'm working on has 2 indentical pages

 

www.websitename.co.uk

www.websitename.co.uk/home.html

 

www.websitename.co.uk has 21 Links In, Page Authority 21,

www.websitename.co.uk/home.html has 578 Links In, Page Authority 24

 

When putting in the canonical tag, which way round be best?

 

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.websitena.../home.html" />

or

 

<link rel="canonical" href="www.websitename.co.uk/" />

 

Im thinking it should be the first, but just wanted to see if im right....

 

Thanks

Edited December 12, 201213 yr by Gecko

The second. Also you should 301 "home.html" to "/" in your .htaccess.

Edited December 12, 201213 yr by Renaissance-Design

Ah, ok, should you add both canonical tag and 301 in hta? I thought it was one or the other....

 

 

Thanks

Ok, thanks Rallport.

 

It would seem that someone has been link building, one lot for one url and on for the other. Thats why I was asking which one I should use:

 

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.websitena.../home.html" />

or

 

<link rel="canonical" href="www.websitename.co.uk/" />

 

Or is it irrelevant....

 

Thanks

Use the second one because it's more future-proof. If you establish "www.websitename.co.uk/" as the root of the site, it doesn't matter whether the homepage is home.html, home.php, index.aspx in future, the site will handle it without having to do yet another redirect. Good URLs don't change.

As you have good back linking structure on www.websitename.co.uk/home.html you should 301 redirect your root domain www.websitename.co.uk to www.websitename.co.uk/home.html once you have redirected their is no need to add canonical , google is smart enough to understand that , search engines are basically concerned with the content on the page , their is not much difference between root domain and an html page when it comes to serps . So don't worry much about SEO or rankings ,if the page has good content with enough authentic back links it will rank.

 

When you research over serps you will find more of pages , categories and posts ranking on the serps for queries rather than domains.