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..
Hi Matt,
the way I learnt to do this was from John Chow-
You go into your google webmaster tools and you can set either www or no www and all traffic with go to one site
That’s another way to do it, providing of course you just want it for the “BigG”..
🙄
So are you saying no www will boost your page rank or are you saying choosing one or the other and sticking to it will boost your page rank?
Hi Wei,
For higher PR you simply need to decide on one form or the other and stick with it.
I choose the “no www” format as, from what I understand, having a shorter URL can help with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your domain.
Cheers,
MattG
Thanks for the tip.