Please help me in solving Canonical tag and 301 redirect issues

[praveenrajan]

Hi, I am facing few serious issues with my website, My site's url goes like this www.example.com/application but if you type www.example.com it is redirecting. We haven't used canonical tag or 301 redirect. While doing Site health checkup I came to know that google is considering exaple.com and example.com/application as different domains. So I have to use canonical tag and 301 redirect. http://example.com and example.com/index.php are also considering as different sites so canonical tag is necessary. My question is, If I want to use canonical tag then which tag should i use? is it rel="canonical" href="www.example.com/" (or) rel="canonical" href="www.example.com/application" ?

I will be wating for experts reply. Please do help me.

Thank You.

[paulsimmons]

Which URL you are focusing on? If the focus is www.example.com/application then you canonical tag should be like rel="canonical" href="www.example.com/application".

[lucy24]

My site's url goes like this www.example.com/application but if you type www.example.com it is redirecting

This is obscure. Do you mean that
www.example.com/
and
www.example.com/application
are the same page? And "/application" occurs in addition to
www.example.com/index.html (or index.php or whatever it happens to be)
?
Well, you can't allow that. You don't need "canonical" tags unless it is truly out of your power to redirect duplicate URLs. Otherwise it's better to redirect everything. Start with an index redirect if you haven't already got one. Mechanics of the redirect will depend on your server. There are separate subforums for Apache and IIS.

If the content is reachable at
www.example.com/
there is not much point to hiding it away at
www.example.com/anything-else-here
Redirect to the shortest and simplest form.

[rvkumarweb]

Hi Praveen,

Here what I understand is you are not redirecting the URLs but it redirect automatically. Let me know which CMS are you using?.

Some of my thoughts

1. May be you redirect shortlink home page URL to application page.
2. Check your Google webmaster tool you may select wrong preference domain.
3. If the page is redirecting from home page to application page why you are thing about canonical tag!. This canonical tags is only applicable for duplicate page, not for redirection! right?.

Check with your development team, there are lots of way to redirected those links like Javascript, FTP server redirection, domain redirection and so on.

Let me know if you have any doubt on this!