Are you still splitting your Google Page Rank in half for no reason?
(Image Credit: Karen B)
So today, I’m going to give you guys a bit of a search engine optimization tip. It might get a bit geeky around here:)
Some of us may heavily rely on search engine traffic and some of us might actually care lees about it. But, whether you actually care about the search engine traffic that you get or not, one SEO factor that you probably should give a damn would be Google Page Rank.
Why? Well, Google Page Rank is not all about getting you Google traffic. It’s a widely accepted yardstick for measuring a blog’s popularity. You get more Google juice for more people linking to you. But, this is just old information. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you guys what you already know.
Now, to something some of you might actually have no idea of. Do you know that domain.com and www.domain.com are two totally different web sites in the eyes of Google? Yeah! You heard me. And if not taken preventative measures, this can so totally mess up your G-Factor?
Well, let me tell you why it’s so much of an issue. When other bloggers link to your blog, it can be with or without the leading WWW. The people linking to your blog with the WWW will help your www.domain.com’s page rank and the other people will help domain.com’s page rank since they are not linking with the leading WWW. Which ultimately means, The page rank your blog deserves gets split between your www address and the address without the leading www.
How can I prevent this and get the total Page rank I deserve? Don’t worry. The solution is simpler than you think. If you don’t already use Google Webmaster Tools, then I say it’s high time that you did. If you haven’t already set-up Google Webmaster Tools for your blog, then follow this article.
Alright! - Now, to the solution…
Step 1: Navigate to your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. You can access it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. You’ll meet with your dashboard screen and your sites list. If you have registered your blog here, you will have to verify the domain. If you can see the ‘verify’ label next to your site’s name, then go ahead and verify it. It won’t take you long and it’s absolutely necessary for the next step.
Step 2: Select your blogs URL from the list and navigate to the ‘Tools’ section from the navigation bar at the left side of the page. You’ll be presented with the following screen.
Step 3: Click on ‘Set preferred domain’ from the list of sub sections that you’re offered. If the option is not selectable, that means you haven’t verified your blog yet. Go back to step 1 and verify your site.
Step 4: Select the option to ALWAYS regard the address with the leading www as the same as the address without the www.
That’s it. You’re done. Told you it was more simpler than you thought.
As a final word, I should tell you that the same thing can be achieved using a 303-redirect as I’ve shown here. But one of the major drawbacks of the 303-redirect is it increases the server load by tonne to redirect a spider/visitor every time it/he/she hits your blog. Rather than editing a file that has the weirdest file-name ever, (.htaccess), isn’t this way easier?
Technorati Tags: Google, Page Rank, PR, Optimize, Google Webmaster Tools, 303 redirect, leading WWW
Make Money, Get free Traffic and A ton of Backlinks by joining AffSphere and submitting your own aricles. It's a unique affiliate friendly article directory. 
TNX lets you sell site-wide links on your blog, and earn money even if you don't have a PageRank attributed to them. Sell links on every post on your blog - and Make Money! 
Register your blog on this private ad marketplace for free and get your banner ads sponsored by thousands of advertisers looking for advertising on Performancing Ads directory. 
Pepperjam is "the" affiliate network - with affiliate transparency. Make money by selecting and promoting dozens of networks to suit your blog. 
OiOPublisher makes it super-easy to sell private advertising on your blog. For a one-time fee, you'll get this awesome plugin, which will turbo-boost and put your blog's money making process on auto-pitot! 
I did this trick of Google webmaster with my blog http://shafiq.pk and after that Google removed all my listings those were with WWW, so keep in mind that Google can remove your listings from SERP.
Shafiq, the removed listings on your blog should have been the ones already listed without the http://WWW.
That’s very useful, I think I’ll have to goto my Google webmasters page and see if I have to fix that. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing this useful information. I have been observing the discrepancy created by the two options of displaying the same website URL. It is a great relief that I can do something about it.
Thanks also for making me to check my status with Google. It was in a poor state, so many things I need to tidy up. Cheers
No problemo. Came as quite a relief to me too when I first came across it.
Thank you so much for this!
I have only just installed it to my site and after seeing this post I changed the setting. It was set to no association, so I changed it to display as http://www. for both options. I assume I did it right! I hope I did anyway!
Thanks again!
Sarah, yes, you’re right. You will now see all of your URLs being treated with http://www. And that’s a good thing!
Mine was set to do nothing, so I changed all my blogs. I never even clicked that Tools link in all this time I’ve been using Google Webmaster Tools, so thanks for writing this post!
My only concern is that I will lose backlinks from people who might have linked to my blog and used the www even though it is not part of my domain name. Will that happen?
Elizabeth, I’m sure such a thing won’t happen. See, the heart of the matter is Google treating these URLs with or without WWW as two different URLs. This option will tell Google that it’s the same URL with or without http://WWW. So, actually, you won’t lose any back-links. What would happen is whether people link to you with or without the WWW, both will contribute to your site’s overall PageRank.
Another method if you’re using WordPress is the Permalink Redirect plugin at http://scott.yang.id.au/code/permalink-redirect/
It will send a 301 (permanant) redirect when your post or domain is approached without your preferred URL. That way, your links won’t be broken and they won’t be removed from Google, but the preferred URL will replace them whenever possible. It has other uses too, like when you change your permalink structure.
That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing this.
But, My former host blocked the Googlebot on my blog for me using the 301 re-direct. It increases the load on the server to redirect everytime a page hits it seems. To me, I would prefer directly telling Google to do what I need. After all, we don’t have any issue with people visiting our sites with or without the leading WWW right?
Useful information and instructions - thanks
[...] in luck. This is an article I wrote sometime back. I think this would answer your question. __________________ ROCKFUSE - [...]
[...] Although I’ve lost the original comment, one reader left an anonymous comment on the post - “Are you splitting your PageRank in half for no reason?“. [...]