Add a 301-redirect and save your blog!

When I first heard about this 301 redirect thingy, I didn’t take it too seriously. But now, I’ve found enough and more reasons to take it into consideration. And I think you should too, before it’s too late.

What’s the big deal?

Well, you know that once you have a domain of your own, you can address it with or without the ‘www’ right? And any sane human being would know that http://www.rockfuse.com or http://rockfuse.com mean the same. But those search engine spiders do not get it. Yes, in fact, they treat those two URLs as URLs of two different sites. Even Google!

So Google might end up giving two different page rankings to http://www.rockfuse.com and http://rockfuse.com. I learnt this the hard way when I uploaded my sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools, and it didn’t get indexed for all my sitemap URLs were starting with http://rockfuse.com, and I’ve submitted http://www.rockfuse.com to Google; Google bots had errors in crawling my site and as a result, a single page didn’t get crawled until I corrected the error.

What’s the solution?

There are two different things you should do.

One! At all times, stick to one URL format. Either with ‘www’ or without. I recommend it with the ‘www’. This way, when you promote your blog in sites like Technorati or Digg, your site blog indexed as one in Google.

Two! Add a 301 redirect. Force your visitors to use ‘www’. You can do so by editing your ‘.htaccess ‘ file and entering,

Rewrite Engine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_POST} !^(.*)\.yoursite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Replace ‘yoursite.com’ with your site domain. (Yes, I know that’s a bit obvious, but in case search engine bots don’t get it… Haha) That’s it… Those 3 lines would do. It’ll stop other sites linking to your sites without the ‘www’, so that your link popularity wouldn’t be split in half. (That could happen… you know…)