My name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer.
For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...
We usually don’t think about it, but most websites can be reached by putting (or NOT putting) a www in front of the URL. It is fairly standard. But does this convenient pre-set configuration hurt you in any way? And if it DOES hurt you, how can you fix it?
I was doing a webinar today with an old friend of mine and he was showing TheWebReviewer on his screen. To my horror, I noticed that all of my side menu had vanished. Trying to be “cool” within the event, I babbled on about opt-in’s and the Home Based Business Test while trying to figure out what happened.
Then I saw it:
http://thewebreviewer.com
It is subtle, but very important to understand what is going on here.
(The worse part about this is that I have preached about this in other places, yet I must have forgotten to execute it when I revised my website!)
The problem was the missing “www” in front of thewebreviewer.com.
Right now, my issue had to do with the way that I programmed the website. I won’t get into the coding details here, but my code and the side menu only recognized “www.thewebreviewer.com”, not “thewebreviewer.com”.
But a more interesting dilema is how the search engines see these two URLs…To you and everyone else, there really is no difference. Most hosting companies configure their servers to recognize both www and non-www URLs. Therefore, it appears to have no affect to the final user.
They can still be seen as two different sites to the search engines, though!
And if this is the case, you have a built-in clone of your site (and with it, a build-in duplicate content source!). Now I do believe that the search engine bots are getting smarter to this, but still, you can never be sure. With duplicate content, you will usually get a solid link for at least one page, but to mix them between your two cloned sites diffuses some of its strength.
What’s the solution?
Well, it is mildly technical, but quite easy to do: Simply redirect your traffic from one URL to the other. Most of us have our websites on Linux with Apache Servers installed (Sorry for this geek talk…if your server can run php functions, it is more than likely an Apache server!). This allows us to make this change within our .htaccess file. Simply add the following code to your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thewebreviewer.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.thewebreviewer.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This is basically saying: “If the person types in http://thewebreviewer.com, perform a (permanent) 301 redirect to http://www.thewebreviewer.com”.
Of course, you would replace “thewebreviewer.com” with your own site, but it is fairly simple and straight forward. Also, be sure to check your existing .htaccess file to see if this has already been done for you.
And remember that you can always test this by simply going to your own website and typing in your URL with and without the www. If it performs a redirect, you should be OK! Else, you may want to consider adding this little bit of code!
cheers…matt
P.S. (And always be sure to back-up your .htaccess file before making any changes!)
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301’s are very useful. My company had two websites, thewebsquad.net and thewebsquad.com. The .net site had PR2 and the .com PR0, very bad stuff. We did a 301 to redirect .net to .com and now we have a PR1, not great but not bad either
November 16th, 2009 at 12:11 pm