One of the biggest bleeds of search engine and page rank juice is a site that is seen as two. What am I talking about?
The search engines indexing www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com separately.
But the fix is easy. In a file named .htaccess (the leading period is crucial) at the root of your site put these three lines (maybe only two if the .htaccess file already exists) to have all of your pages contain the leading www:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
If you want your site indexed with no leading www:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
You don’t need to understand what all the symbols or numbers mean, just copy exactly as above. Then test your site. If it doesn’t work there’s a typo, usually an extra space or missing space.
I will create a more detailed post in Internet Marketing Web Tech if comments show a demand.
Tags: .htaccess, seo, searchengine optimization, search index
