Redirects

[dmje]

I am not sure if this is the right place to post this inquiry, but here goes. My site is hosted on a Linux based server and I noticed the following when I went in to setup some redirects for pages that no longer exist....

[mysite.com...] to redirect) --> [(where...] you want it redirected to)

not sure how to phrase my next question to get what I want to know across......

It is my understanding that non www pages and www pages make a difference in the search engines. By looking at the above, does that mean that all my pages are non www?

I ran a small test and checked some of my pages both with and without the www and most of them were the same except most of the non www pages did not have page rank whereas the www pages did.

Am I making a mountain out of molehill here, or is this something I should be concerned about or am I just totally confused and way off base?

Thanks

[jdMorgan]

dmje,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Best practice is to pick www or non-www as the canonical domain, and 301-Redirect all traffic from the other domain to the same page on the canonical domain. I'm using 'canonical' here in it's wide sense -- it means 'standard, orthodox, usual, generally-accepted, or customary,' but you'll see that term in the Apache documentation, too.

In your case, you'll probably want to redirect from the domain with low/no PR to the domain with higher PR. If you have any singinificant-PR incoming links to the low-PR domain, then ask the webmasters who control those links to correct them.

Typically, webmasters use Redirect or RedirectMatch directives of mod_alias [httpd.apache.org] in a <VirtualHost> container in their httpd.conf file so that only the non-canonical domain is redirected, or use mod_rewrite [httpd.apache.org] directives in .htaccess or httpd.conf.

Note that use of mod_rewrite is required if you can only put code in .htaccess, because you must test the requested HTTP_HOST and only redirect if it is not the canonical domain name.

Mountains out of molehills? Not if you care about efficient spidering and PageRank, no.

There are 600+ threads on this subject [google.com] here at WebmasterWorld, so others think it important, too. I'd recommend looking into them for more information.

Jim

[dmje]

Thanks Jim for the quick response.

Your answer brings up another question. Right now I have some redirects that go from [mysite.com...] to [mysite.com...] If I go into My CPanel Admin Server menu to Manage Redirects and tell it to redirect [mysite.com...] to www.mysite.com will I have to re-do all the redirects that are there now?

I am a little leary of doing anything as I have good page rank on the www and great traffic with things the way they are right now and I dont want to screw that up, but if redirecting it will improve upon that then its worth the risk.

Thanks,

Kelley (dmje)

[jdMorgan]

Kelley,

I don't use cPanel, so I don't know what kind of code it generates.

However you do it, I'd advise a 'top down' approach; First fix the domain, and then fix any individual URLS that need to be changed.

When implementing the domain redirect, you want cPanel to generate code that redirects example.com/<anything> to www.example.com/<anything>, so that all pages are redirected from the non-canonical domain to the same page in the canonical domain. After that, add the code needed to redirect pages to new URLs within the canonical domain.

And by all means, check your server response with the server headers checker [webmasterworld.com] in the WebmasterWorld control panel after taking each step -- You want to see a 301-Moved Permanently response to incorrect domain or changed URL requests.

Jim