The link rel canonical tag lets you solve canonical issues for your URL without having to resort to 301 redirects or other potentially complicated approaches. This article explains how to take advantage of the tag in your PHP-powered web sites.
To understand how to implement this, we must illustrate first how 301 redirection is used to solve this type of problem. Consider the example below, which illustrates a typical non-www and www canonical issue:
Googlebot sees a non-www URL during a crawling session ---> http://somewebsite.com/myfile.php ---> if non-www ---> server will do a 301 redirect to the www canonical version ---> http://www.somewebsite.com/myfile.php ---> Googlebot indexes the www version
Therefore, this means that if Googlebot sees any non-www URL, the server will do a 301 redirect so that Googlebot will index the canonical version.
What should happen when we use the link rel canonical element? See the diagram below:
Googlebot sees a non-www URL during a crawling session ----> http://somewebsite.com/myfile.php ----> Google sees the link rel canonical tag in the head section of this file <link rel="canonical" href="http://wwww.somewebsite.com/myfile.php" /> ------> Google indexes the canonical URL provided.
This means that we have to place this tag in the <head> section so that if any non-www URL is being crawled, Googlebot will fetch the canonical www URL.
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