[MWP]

I recently learned it could be beneficial to have my non www. site pointing to www. and understand that I need to change the .htaccess (I think!). Now I have my hosting with 1&1, so mailed their help centre on how to go about this. The response they sent back said "your site is automatically accessible on both the www. and non www. versions. This is already set up when you sign up and both domain versions are working correctly".

That seemed to me that they misunderstood what I was asking so I mailed again asking if I can do a permanent redirect from the non www. to the www. to avoid the possibility of duplicate content and received the same message back!

Has anyone else had any dealings with this subject and 1&1 and have any advice, and is the risk of my site being classed as duplicate content really that likely??

Many thanks.

[TomCash]

It's important you tell Google Webmaster tools which version of the website you wish to refer to. Then also build all your links to reflect that.

As for one and one - there's an easy way around this.

If your route directory for your website, where all of your files sit.

Create or edit your .htaccess file to contain the following lines of code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

That will send anyone from the http://yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com

Hope this helps!

[brightonmike]

They're right, they automatically permanently redirect your non-www to your www. I know, because I have 1&1 and it happened for me.

There's an easy way to find out: http://www.seoconsul...r-headers-tool/

If you get a 301 response when you use your non-www domain, then a permanent redirect is already setup.

You don't need to do anything.

[MWP]

brightonmike, on 02 September 2011 - 08:56 AM, said:

They're right, they automatically permanently redirect your non-www to your www. I know, because I have 1&1 and it happened for me.

There's an easy way to find out: http://www.seoconsul...r-headers-tool/

If you get a 301 response when you use your non-www domain, then a permanent redirect is already setup.

You don't need to do anything.

Thanks for that link. I'm getting a 200 code response so looks like I'll need to change it.

[MWP]

TomCash, on 02 September 2011 - 08:21 AM, said:

It's important you tell Google Webmaster tools which version of the website you wish to refer to. Then also build all your links to reflect that.

As for one and one - there's an easy way around this.

If your route directory for your website, where all of your files sit.

Create or edit your .htaccess file to contain the following lines of code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

That will send anyone from the http://yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com

Hope this helps!

Perfect. All done and working. Thank you!

[TomCash]

Hey, no problem! Thanks for the +1!

[handatravel]

i think pointing to www backlinks is more useful than without www