Resolve the Canonical Issue

Redirect Using cPanel

If your website is hosted with a provider that uses cPanel, you can even set up your redirects without touching a line of code. This actually adds the redirect rule directly to the .htaccess file, but sometimes I’d rather not get my hands dirty. To do this, log in to your cPanel, and go to Redirects.

Redirect WWW to non-WWW:

Redirect non-WWW to WWW:

Redirect Using .htaccess

If your site is hosted on Apache, you can redirect from the WWW to the non-WWW, or vice versa, with a few lines in your .htaccess file.

Redirect WWW to non-WWW:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(yourdomain\.com)?$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect non-WWW to WWW:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.yourdomain\.com)?$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Google Webmaster Tools

If you’ve verified your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you can set your preferred domain by going to Site Configuration > Settings, and selecting either ‘Display URLs as www.yourdomain.com’ or ‘Display URLs as yourdomain.com’.

This will make sure that Google only indexes your preferred canonical URL. However, it doesn’t fix the problem of splitting your link juice so you should still set up a redirect using one of the following methods.