Redirect Your Domain’s Cousins

Whenever we bought a domain, we owned it and it belongs to us alone. How true…Do you know that your domain has three cousins who always tagged along unnoticed?

Let us look at it thoroughly. I bought this domain; neatten.com. I created a blog and proudly promote http://www.neatten.com to my readers. Unexpectedly, I created another 3 blogs that are identical which belong to its cousins. So, who are they? See the list below:

The exact URL:

http://www.neatten.com/

The cousins:

http://www.neatten.com
http://neatten.com
http://neatten.com/

Look similar aren’t they? To our naked eyes, they indeed look the same as it directs to the same entry due to browser behaviors. However, please take note. Search engine spiders don’t use browsers. They see your blog through URL. The worst part is, they treat these links as 4 different entries, resulting in penalty of having duplicate content. Additionally, it also affect your PageRank as experienced by Digg. Sad, isn’t it?

In order to avoid this from happening, I listed down 2 methods of which you can use.

Option 1: Use htaccess
All you need to do is create an htaccess file and insert the code below. This method uses “301 redirect” to establish SEO permanent redirect from other formats to this format; http://www.neatten.com/. Upload the file to your root directory of your server. Test it immediately for errors as incorrect entry costs you fatal HTTP 500 error code.

# permanently redirect from non-www domain to www domain
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Alternatively, if you prefer the non-www version, use this instead.

# permanently redirect from www domain to non-www domain
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Option 2: Use plugin
Unfortunately, not all of us have the direct access to the root directory of our server. Worry not as there’s a plugin; Permalink Redirect by Scott Yang that do the tedious jobs for you.

Basically, all it does is ensuring that there’s only one URL associated with each blog entry. It works by comparing the requested URL, and if it does not match the permalink, a redirect will be sent instead. Not only it works for individual blog, but also to page entries and archives page.

Pretty handy, isn’t it?

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Posted on: June 3, 2008 | Under Blog Optimization 
 

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