Yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com?

Written by admin on September 21st, 2008 in Site Development.

Did you know that when you type “yourdomain.com” or “www.yourdomain.com”, they seem to both point to your website, but they are not the same?

Why would this matter?

To the search engine, they are actualy treated as two different sites and you are not getting the full credit for the incoming links or traffic. (It’s like two sites splitting your credit into 2)

Here is our site indexed by Google with www.

Google Index

Here is our site indexed by Goole without www.

Google Index

Even though we used the trick below to keep the numbers exactly the same, they are still slightly different.

One way to avoid this is to make sure yourdomain.com is always transferred to www.yourdomain.com so one site gets all the credit. Is one better than the other? That’s debatable and probably not.

Here is how you would automatically point yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com by editing your .htaccess file.

AuthName www.completemartialarts.com
IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^completemartialarts\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.completemartialarts.com/$1 [R=301,L]

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