Although I’m sure many of us don’t pay attention to the SEO of our sites because we just like to write and get on with life, there are a couple of quick fixes you can do to your site that will go a long way in helping you out in the Search Engine rankings. As much as we’d like to think all the Search Engines have their stuff together, they really don’t. One of the most non-sensical things is how they handle www. vs. non-www domains.
You work hard to get your site placed highly in the search engines. However, you find that different search terms use different pages on your site depending on how people link to you. Some may prefer to use the “www” while others will leave it off. You shouldn’t have to worry whether your www. domain has a higher ranking than your non-www. domain.
The problem is that the search engines see these as two different domains. If you are using Apache and have access to .htaccess files the best thing to do is redirect all your urls to either use “www” or not. I prefer not. Besides, www. is deprecated.
Here is the code I use:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^wisdump.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://wisdump.com/$1 [R=301,L]
With this code all of my pages and PR go to one domain instead of being split. If you are doing this to a new site that has yet to be indexed you are fine. If you are going to do this with an existing site then expect a tiny fluctuation as the search engines adjust. Is this really necessary? Probably not as Search Engines continue to improve, but it’s such a quick fix that there really is no reason not to do this.
If you missed it make sure to checkout yesterday’s discussion on redirects and third party services.
UPDATE: Both John Gruber and Mike West have much more thorough articles than the one I wrote along with some additional tips so I suggest you give them a read as well.
Originally posted on May 21, 2006 @ 11:52 am