Why you should redirect yourblog.com to www.yourblog.com
Why you should you redirect yourblog(.)com to www(.)yourblog(.)com (or vice versa)?
Here is why, below is a report from www.websitegrader.com that I generated for one of my websites www.adesdesign.net. Here is what it says:
Search engines often regard www.adesdesign.net and adesdesign.net as two different websites unless you take specific measures to signal to them that they are the same site.
The best way to handle this situation is to setup what is known as a permanent redirect (or a “301″ redirect) from one of these sites to the other. This way, any links that are pointing to the secondary site benefit the primary site, from an SEO perspective.
We could not detect a permanent redirect for this site, so it may be experiencing the negative effects of link fragmentation (some of the inbound links may point to www.adesdesign.net and others to adesdesign.net) For example, www.adesdesign.net seems to have 99,101 inbound links whereas adesdesign.net has 99,478 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.
That means Search Engines might be thinking that my adesdesign.net and www.adesdesign.net are two separate sites. Putting a 301 redirect will send them a signal, which will say both domains are in fact the same site. And therefore, the stats of both domains will be combined and rated as one by the Search Engines. And this probably will improve the overall SEO ranking.
How to do a 301 Redirect
Just copy and paste the following code in your .htaccess file in your root directory. If you are not sure of what is .htaccess file, it’s better not to touch the file. Because if you rewrite the contents of .htaccess file with new one, you may screw up your whole site. So be careful!
Note: You should update the .htaccess file and not replace it with new. Unless of course you know what you are doing.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
If it is a blog, usually WordPress would have some codes inside the .htaccess file, without touching those codes you should just add the above codes at the end of your file.
Related Posts
- .htaccess basics
- WP Plugin: all-in-one htaccess plugin
- Tip: Increase your blog’s chances to get Stumbled(Upon)
- Matt Cuts’ white hat SEO tips, video + text summary
- How to redirect traffic that comes from certain URL to another
By Wallace on Sep 11, 2007
http://www.blogclout.com/blog/increase-your-search-engine-traffic-by-15-20-in-3-minutes/
By teknolojik internet magazini on Sep 11, 2007
Really nice post,
thank you.
By HighFivez.com on Sep 11, 2007
Nice post. For Wordpress, should the above code be placed within …
By Rob on Sep 11, 2007
was looking for this kind of info since quiet a time now. I heard about redirect the domain to http://www.domain but i didn’t know how to do it. Thanks!
By Ades on Sep 11, 2007
In WordPress, it’s still placed in your .htaccess file. You can get this file through FTP client when you login to your site. Sometimes, web hosts keep this file invisible, which will make it difficult to get it… in that case contact your hosting tech support.
By DayJobNuker on Sep 11, 2007
I want to do it but I don’t know where to place the file. I am too scared to try without a very detailed walkthrough.
By Abhijeet on Sep 12, 2007
When I read the title, I thought it’s only good to redirect yourblog.com to http://www.yourblog.com - This WWW thing is important. And it made me curious because this is not what I was aware of before. But it seems my understanding and implementation for couple of my websites was correct. Nice article though, and one more thing, I came from 45n5 top list.
By Make Money Blog on Sep 12, 2007
You can also configure Google bot to crawl only one(either www version or non www version ) using Google Webmaster Tools (Preferred domain option). This way Google will know these are actually same URL.