Hi All,

 

I was just having a play around with Hubspots website grader for one of my domains and it has told me that I should really be using a 301 redirect as search engines will favor my site more. Well actually the exact words it used were..

 

Search engines may think www.mydomain.org and mydomain.org are two different sites.You should set up a permanent redirect (technically called a "301 redirect") between these sites. Once you do that, you will get full search engine credit for your work on these sites.

 

Is this really Important as I have always just catered for mapping the two variations in my apache config by using www.myserver.org as the 'ServerName' and myserver.org as a 'ServerAlias'

 

Perhaps this is having an adverse affect on my rankings........

 

Rgds,

 

Dave

 

I always do a non www. redirect to the www. then do a redirect from the homepage to the root e.g. index.html / index.php > domain.co.uk.

 

Potentially you can have 4 websites on Google e.g http://domaain.co.uk, http://www.domain.co.uk, http://www.domain.co.uk/index.html & http://domain.co.uk/index.html

 

To do this create a new file called .htaccess (remember the dot) and upload the file to the root of the domain e.g. in the public_html file.

 

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteRule index\.html http://www.domain.co.uk/ [NC,R]
</IfModule>

Edited January 13, 201115 yr by Faevilangel

Thanks for your input, I will certainly try and make some changes and see if my traffic goes up... That's certainly something I've never considered until today.

 

I tend to favour putting my rewrite code in the site definition files though rather than htaccess if I can help it.

 

Ok got things working with

 

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^xxx.co.uk/(.*)$ http://www.xxx.co.uk$1 [L,R=301]

 

All seems good, so will keep an eye on analytics now and see if theres any difference :-)

Edited January 13, 201115 yr by daveb