Increase Your Link Juice, Consolidating Your Links To One Website
Let’s talk search engine optimization (SEO). Specifically I want to talk about the importance of concatenation of your “non-www” url with your “www” url so your links are pointing to one website.
Before we begin lets check to see how our non-www and our www url is set up. To do this lets check the server headers. Go to this link – Check Server Headers – and enter your non-www into the field provided. Below you will see a response, typically of either a 200 ok, or a 301 permanent move, or a 302 temporary move. After you get the information on the non-www server header, do the same thing with the www url.
What you DON’T WANT TO SEE is a 200 ok for both the non-www and www. Why …well basically this result means your non-www and www urls are considered two different sites. Depending on how your website has been getting indexed (and how you have been submitting backlinks), this could be hurting your search results!
To make sure this is not hurting your website, you will want to concatenate your non-www with your www.
First, if you have been using a mix of non-www and www in your backlink campaign, stop! Pick one version. Which version should you use. Well …generally there is no benefit to using one or the other, non-ww vs. www. However, if you have been using a mix and you are unsure of which version to use here are a few suggestions to help make a decision.
- Type in the non-www into your browser, using the Google Toolbar, check Googles PageRank. Next, type in the www version and check Googles PageRank. If one is higher that will be good to know before Rewriting your URL.
- Next, type in your primary keywords that provide you with the most traffic. Find your listing(s) and note the url that is being linked; is it the non-www or the www??? Depending on the url that is indexed will also help you in making a final decision as to what version to use.
Once you made your choice on non-www or www you will want to do the following:
For a website on a Unix Server you will be changing (or adding) a htaccess file. NOTE! -CAUTION you should have technical experience when changing a htaccess file. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
With that being said. If you are on a UNIX server create an htaccess file and add the following code making sure to replace the “yourwebaddress” with your website address:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebaddress.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebaddress.com/$1 [R=301,L]
The above code will change your “non-www” into your “www”. It will also tell the server that it is a permanent move; which is what you want in this case. If you want to keep your non-www as your primary, switch the RewriteCode.
If you are a Windows Server contact your host and ask them to make the change for you.
To make sure your Rewrite was done correctly use this link – Check Server Headers – Once you are on the site recheck your server headers. Depending on how you Rewrote the url(s) you will either see a 301 permanent move or a 200 ok.
As a result of doing this you will consolidate your links to one website giving you a bigger BANG for every link.
In the next post learn how to set your preferred domain in Google!
Gary,
This is a very important topic; it is vital that the non-www and the www versions of a client website are in sync with each other. Thanks for the clarification and the step-by-step.
Craig L-P