Pastrommy [dot] Com

Posts Tagged ‘www’

One important part of search engine optimization is making sure your URL’s aren’t competing with one another. The URL “pastrommy.com” is different than “www.pastrommy.com” according to search engines. Since search engines are the most important traffic source, you better submit to their standards.

It doesn’t matter so much whether you choose to attach the “www.” or not but it is very important that you pick one or the other. Not choosing whether to append the “www.” or not means that your web pages will be spidered with and without the prefix. What does this mean to you? It means you’ll be competing with yourself! It’s hard enough to rank on competitive keywords so why make it harder.

So how do you fix it? Wordpress couldn’t make it easier. In fact, if you wanted to, you could totally forget you ever read this post and you would be perfectly fine. Wordpress automatically changes your URLs according to your settings.

For example, if your settings look like this:

Then when someone types “computermemoryinfo.com” into their browser, they are automatically redirected to “www.computermemoryinfo.com”. It is very important that everyone sees the same URL.

What if I’m not running Wordpress? If you’re not running Wordpress, you’ll need to make a file named .htaccess in the root directory and insert the following code.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YOURDOMAINNAME\.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Voila! You now have a single URL that all visitors see!