Cormac Moylan

For some reasons search engines see http://cormacmoylan.com and http://www.cormacmoylan.com as two seperate websites. To educated the search bots and to consolidate links to a single domain name you should use a 301 redirect.

A 301 redirect will ensure that the bots see a www.domain name and a http://domain name as the same. If you have 100 results pointing to http://domain and 200 pointing to www.domain then you’re not going to move up the search places as much as if you have 300 results pointing to a single domain.

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

Open up notepad and just replace the ‘yourdomain’ text with your domain name and save as a .htaccess file. Upload this file to the root of your domain and CHMOD the file to 644.

Recently enough i purchased blaa.ie to aid in my irish rankings while I kept blaa-blaa.com to help me in international searches. Google and Yahoo! can however penalize you if you have sites with duplicate content.

This is where the 301 redirect comes to play once more.

By using the following code in a .htaccess file I can tell search bots that blaa.ie is the new blaa-blaa.com. All the pages that have previously been indexed by the search bots will automatically redirect to the new domain.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting! Cormac