www vs non www Urls via htaccess
Clean or pretty Urls are not only easy for your visitors to remember but effects your Page Rank by making it easier for the search engine to crawl your site. This is a really simple SEO trick. The average web developer might not put much thought into the difference and yet I see even so called SEO experts and huge sites with SEO companies working for them ignore this basic search engine optimization solution.
What you need to know about canonicalization is that Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and the other search engines see a site using both URL’s as two different pages.
Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:
- www.website.com
- website.com/
- www.website.com/index.html
- website.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and the other search engines “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.
The amount of duplicate content can negatively effect your PR (page ranks) in Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and the other search engines.
Yes, you read that right.
If your site resolves to both http:// and to http:// with the www afterwards then the search engines including Google consider those to be two completely different URL’s and will allocate your Pagerank accordingly.
What this means is that for example if you are a Pagerank 4 when you load your site with www and you are also a Pagerank 4 without it then you are splitting your potential Page Rank between those two URL’s.
If you try to type in http://www.numafrica.com you will see that I have placed a permanent 301 redirect to http://numafrica.com/ to prevent this.
This is a very simple redirect using .htaccess but a good SEO tweak that will do wonders for getting the most out of your Page Rank.
I have chosen to redirect to non-www but there is absolutely no SEO benefit or loss to choosing one over the other. The important thing SEO wise is to just choose one and stick with it. Load your index page into your browser with and without the www and simply pick whichever is higher in Pagerank, or if they are both the same then just
Tags: Ask, Content, Domain name, Google, MSN, MSN Live, NumAfrica, Page Rank, Search Engine, Search engine optimization, SEO, VoIP, Vox, Yahoo
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