Website To Include WWW As Prefix Or Not?

Thursday 21st April 2005 08:46:00 AM

Thought I would share a tip in regards to search engine optimization and user accessibility.

First decide on whether you want to prefix www as part of the website url or not, otherwise search engines will think every page on your site is a duplicate as the page will be available on www.example.com and example.com. This is likely to reduce your ranking power.

From the user's perspective it makes it that little bit easier and clearer to remember the domain name. I prefer to have a prefix as I think regular users would feel awkward not typing www. on the world wide web, although I am sure there are others who disagree.

If you have access to php and can use the .htaccess file on your server insert the following code at the beginning, replacing example.com with your domain.

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This code will permanently redirect any traffic that does not have www. as a prefix to the correct address.

Posted by Piniyini in Htaccess