htaccess Settings with MaxCDN

CDN, SEO, htaccess

[Lowkei]

Hi all,

I need help on setting up MaxCDN. There's a tutorial in MaxCDN about adding canonical tags using .htaccess for SEO purposes. I'm kinda dumb on this and need some advice/ help on what's all this about. From the code I can guess that it instructs .htaccess to label all those cached file with canonical tag. But that's my guess. I need some verifications from you expert. (to correct whatever wrong you see)

Currently my site is optimized by Yoast WordPress SEO and I can see the plugin adding canonical tag on every pages. Therefore do I need those extra code in .htaccess as recommended in MaxCDN's tutorial?

Below is the code, and here is the link to the tutorial page - [support.maxcdn.com...]

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf|webp|html)(\.gz)?(\?.*)?$">
 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
  RewriteRule .* - [E=CANONICAL:http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI},NE]
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on
  RewriteRule .* - [E=CANONICAL:https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI},NE]
 </IfModule>
 <IfModule mod_headers.c>
  Header set Link "<%{CANONICAL}e>; rel=\"canonical\""
 </IfModule>
</FilesMatch>

Any guidance/ words would be much appreciated. Thanks for your time!

[phranque]

this solves nothing for you.
it creates an environment variable based on the requested url and uses that to create a self-referring link rel canonical header.
if the requested url is already canonical it doesn't need the header.
you could argue that it makes sense to include self-referring link rel canonical elements in the document head to reduce damage from scrapers.
this solution instead sends the header, which is transient, rather than the element, which is permanent.

[Lowkei]

Do you mean it actually creates a canonical tag with the value "the cached file path" which is absolutely differ from the original file path?

[phranque]

Do you mean it actually creates a canonical tag with the value "the cached file path" which is absolutely differ from the original file path?

i would assume those instruction were for your server and the request your server sees is not "the cached file path".

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritecond

REQUEST_URI

The path component of the requested URI, such as "/index.html". This notably excludes the query string which is available as as (sic) its own variable named QUERY_STRING.

this increases the chances that it might not be the canonical url, which may actually contain a query string.