I mentioned in a recent post about my nifty new PageRank that I didn’t think I’d written a post about redirecting links from your www domain name to one without. What this means basically is that all incoming traffic that points to the www version of your domain name, like www.freshblogger.com, gets redirected to the version without, like freshblogger.com.
Why do this? Well, there’s some evidence to show that at least Google sees both of these URL’s as distinctly different. In my own case, freshblogger.com has a PageRank of 5, while www.freshblogger.com has a PageRank of 3. Apparently, the links to this site are being split up between the different URL’s, with each one getting some PageRank instead of one getting it all. This has the effect of diluting the potential PageRank of your blog or website.
There is also a school of thought on the internet that believes that the www subdomain designation is or should be deprecated, or no longer used. I think this argument makes some sense. Regardless, I’ve followed the directions available at the site I just linked to, no-www.org, and I’ll reprint them here for you as they appear down the page somewhat from the top on the original site.
This modification is very simple, but requires that your site is hosted on an Apache webserver and that you have an .htaccess file that you have permissions to edit. I want to caution you that you should NOT attempt to do this if you aren’t absolutely sure of what you’re doing. Find someone knowledgeable in web programming who is willing to help out. If you mess up the .htaccess file for your website, you may not be able to access it at all until it gets fixed.
With that said, the modification is actually pretty simple. Take the following code and add it to your .htaccess file, making sure to change where it says ‘domain’ to the actual domain name of your site.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I know there are other ways of accomplishing this task, and also there will be some who even question whether it will be useful at all. I don’t know exactly what effect it may have had on my site, but I believe it has been positive for me. If you’re using a web server other than Apache, you can surely find directions as to how to do this somewhere. You can also sign into Google’s WebMasterCentral with your Google account credentials and change your preferred URL from the www version. While this should help, I feel like the simple modification to the .htaccess file helps to cover all bases.
