\nWebsites that can be accessed from multiple URL’s aren’t very search engine friendly.\n<\/p>\n
\nSometimes this structure may have evolved by accident as a site was developed at different times on varying technologies. You don’t want to turn off the old links as that would loose valuable search engine equity, but you don’t want them scattered on multiple URL’s either.\n<\/p>\n
\nThere is a solution, and that is to use a canonical URL.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe easiest is to add a simple link element to the page with it’s correct canonical URL. For example, if we have a page that can be reached at \nNotice the use of \nGoogle, Yahoo and Microsoft have all agreed to support this canonical link element.\n<\/p>\n \nAnother approach is to redirect the user to the page on the correct URL server side. Using Apache, this can be done using a \nUsing the same example, the rewrite rule would be something like this\n<\/p>\nwww.example.com\/test.html<\/code>, example.com\/test.html<\/code> or beta.example.com\/test.html<\/code>. we only want this to be index at www.example.com\/test.html<\/code>, so we can use add a link element as follows…\n<\/p>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.example.com\/test.html\" \/>
\n<\/code><\/div>\nrel=\"canonical\"<\/code>, this is tells a search engine if it has accessed the page from another URL, it’s actually meant to be indexed from this URL.\n<\/p>\nRewriteRule<\/code> and couple of RewriteCond<\/code>‘s.\n<\/p>\n