So I was in a bit of a rush to make this video for you and it probably comes across because this stuff is important and I want you to take action to improve your site today.. So… Go go go…!!
Alright so let me explain this in further detail for those of you who might be still scratching your heads going “Uh.. wtf man?”.
Look at your browser address bar.. yup that thing right at the top of your screen with a web address that looks something like this: http://getmoresales.info/blog/prevent-a-different-type-of-duplicate-content.html
OK, now notice the ‘http://‘ bit?
Awesome, some sites are indexed in search engines as either http:// or www - yep, your site can be listed twice and that’s not a good thing. Search engines like Google can see this as… dum dum dum.. duplicate content.
Why’s that so bad? Well, having duplicate content means that some of your pages will not be indexed by search engines. And we want all our stuff to be indexed so we get more hits, right?
Right.
And here’s another kicker for you… not only could search engines view your site as a duplicate, you could also be missing out on some valuable Google PageRank.
I’ll let Google explain what PageRank is in their own terms:
PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
So PageRank, or PR, matters, but it’s not as important as some SEO’s claim.
Anyway if a site with a high PR is linking to your http:// version and another high PR site is linking to your www version, you’re missing out on some quality PR juice.
And how do we stop this? Real easy.
A lot of sites have a file called a .htaccess, if yours doesn’t go ahead and open notepad now and make one. We literally want to call the file .htaccess - don’t forget the dot (.) at the begining.
Cut & paste this code into your .htaccess file, rename the bits in red to match your site and hit save.
# Redirect non-www urls to www
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YOUR-SITE.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOUR-SITE-HERE.com/$1 [R=301,L]Upload to your public_html folder and that’s it.
This will make sure that all backlinks to your site divert to the www version, and send along all that PR juice with it - oh and stop search engines from viewing 2 different versions of your site.
Easy stuff right? And they say this web stuff is tricky…
This is definitely great stuffs and I think all people with websites should know about this. I have lost out in PR and search engine rankings because I was not aware of this, until someone gave me the link to this page. I will be tweeting this for all people to know,. Thanks again and great stuff here!
great job with the /httacess. Thanks for sharing