What Is A Canonical Redirect?

For best results, each page of a website should be reachable at a single persistent url. This address is known as the page's canonical url (Canonical refers to being the authoratitive address). If there are other addresses which should reach the same page then these should be redirected to the canonical url using http redirection. This redirect is a canonical redirect.

There are a number of scenarios where you might need a canonical redirect.

• Redirecting the non-www version of your domain to www i.e. if you request http://websitetodos.com/list/websitetodos you will be redirected to http://www.websitetodos.com/list/websitetodos .
• Alternate brand domains e.g. if you have registered common typos of your domain name and want them to resolve to your main site then you will want to use a canonical redirect.
• Promotional urls i.e. the marketing department needs a short easily remembered url for a non-web marketing campaign even though the actual page really lives elsewhere on the site.
• Moved pages.
• Changing domains.