Rel="canonical" and rewrite
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Hi,
I'm going to describe a scenario on one of my sites, I was wondering if someone could tell me what is the correct use of rel="canonical" here.
Suppose I have a rewrite rule that has a rule like this:
RewriteRule ^Online-Games /main/index.php
So, in the index file, do I set the rel="canonical" to Online-Games or /main/index.php?
Thanks.
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Great, thanks a lot!
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Your example is not a case where you would use canonical links.
Canonical links are useful when you have several pages which are accessible vial individual URLs and do not redirect to a single page, yet they have very similar content.
A great example is a category page in an online store. Quite often, you will find various sorting methods, like price, popularity, etc. These various sorting methods usually add a parameter to the URL, something like "order=price". Yet, the content remains largely the same.
In cases such as above, the different pages should have a canonical reference to the main page.
In your case, you simply need a 301 redirect, that's all.
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None of the above. If you have a .htaccess file, you need to 301 /main/index.php to OnlineGames. Another option is to tell index.php it can only be called as OnlineGames, or 301 to that directory. The reason is you're pretending that index.php is a directory. You don't want to waste the time of bots crawling the same page twice so just 301 it. You remove the issue entirely and save your crawl budget.
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