You may have noticed that some blogs don’t begin with the usual “www” at the start, this one being an example.

If you try typing in http://www.blogtactics.com in to your browser you will end up back at the http://blogtactics.com version

Why have I done this?

Well Google considers the “www” version and no “www” version of your site as two seperate domains.

Over time, as you get more backlinks to your site, some of those links will point to the non “www” version, and some will point to the “www” version, so in Google’s eyes that pagerank “link juice” is split across two seperate domains, meaning you’re losing out…

Fortunately it’s pretty quick and easy to fix.

There’s two ways of doing it, first you can try simply adding the “no-www” plugin for wordpress. This attempts to update the relevant file (.htaccess) for you with the correct code, but it doesn’t always work, as sometimes your hosting won’t let the plugin have access to the .htaccess file, in which case you need to do it manually, which I’ve covered in the video below..

Note: if you do use the “no www” plugin you will also need to update the version of your domain url in the “options” -> “General” settings tab to the no-www version.

I’ve added a link for downloading the “no www” plugin on the BlogTactics Plugins page.

Here’s the video on how to do it manually, and this method can also be used for regular html/php sites as well as for blogs..

Tags: Blog SEO