Canonical redirects

[socialengaged]

Hello,

I have a quick question: I use wordpress for my website. I have a plugin for translating the website in other languages. Thus, I have 2 versions of urls, one with /en, one without (original languale). This has been seen as duplicate content.

I have been advised that the best to do is to use canonical redirect. Should I use it on the general header.php (the only header I can find in the CMS), or should I redirect each page singularly? I believe the second is the best way, but I can't find headers and txt documents for each page in my FTP.

As well I have seen this post, in which is explained that canonical redirects can be done directly in the general header.php http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2009/02/avoid-duplicate-content-use-canonical-url-in-wordpress-fix-plugin/

Is it true? You have any suggestion?
Thanks!

Eugenio

[socialengaged]

Thank you Adam,

Very good answer, thats what I needed

Please let me know if I understood good:

Should I replace the /contact.php in the example to my real address /en/contact?

And basically I should put the below condition. Should I write this code for each url i want to redirect? so that it would be like

if /en/contact, then  rel="canonical" /contact

else /contact

if /en/about-us, then  rel="canonical" /about-us

else /about-us

etc?

[Adam_Cochran]

Since you are using wordpress you won't have individual pages in your FTP. The only way you could edit something into the individual pages would be each posts edit page on the CMS. However, I don't know if doing that would work since its technically beneath the head.

And yes the canonical redirect can be done in the general header, although personally I would load it as a php IF criteria. In other words you add it to the general header but tell it only to load that if i t is on one of these /en pages. That way you don't have the canonical applied to other pages you actually want, or the main page that it is directing too as that would cause an odd loop for the spiders that I doubt they would respond positively too.

Here you can find a quick sample of working with the PHP if page criteria: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7997016/if-this-page-show-this-else-show-this

Good luck!