Many site owners make the mistake of duplicating their site’s home page. They will have the same content for http://www.url.com, http://url.com, and http://www.url.com/index.html. This will result in lost link value and therefore damage the rankings of the site’s homepage. For example you may have your internal links pointing to http://www.url.com but outside sites may be linking to http://url.com. Therefore you will be diluting the effectiveness of your site.
If you find many links outside the site pointing to both the non-www and the www version, it may be wise to use a 301 re-write rule so all pages will be redirected to the same url.
How to include the 301 re-write rule in your web site
1. Create a .htaccess file. Open notepad, name and save the file as .htaccess (there is no extension).
2. Place this code in your .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
3. If the .htaccess file already has lines of code in it,
skip a line, then add the above code.
4. Save the .htaccess file
5. Upload the file to the root folder of your server.
6. Test your homepage. Type http://url.com, or /www.url.com into your browser’s address bar. Any of these urls will now automatically be redirected to http://www.url.com
Tip
Whenever exchanging links with other sites or getting incoming links make sure you always use http://www.url.com
This will make sure you preserve the link value of your site.
I had some thoughts on a similar SEO / Search Engine Optimization related topic, maybe i’ll start a new thread
Thanks. I used your code to fix my sites.
Hi,
I am working as SEO and Web Promotion expert from last 1 n 1/2 years and now start free lancing work also. I contacted many companies and i got some projects also. I recentally come to this blog and found some interesting discussion about duplicate content.
I also want to share my experience with one my company website. One of our company website was well ranked in Google for all our main keywords. The site was dynamic and we had have more than 100 thousand pages in Google. We did good work and our site ranked in top for many keywords. This site live from last three years and we are still doing well.
Few days before i found that our listing in SERP decrease day by day and we are now not listed in top 100. I found many duplication in our web pages. I read many articles and blogs to get ideas from other webmasters and i found good help. Finally i come to the point that if you own a big website and have hundreds or thousands of pages than make sure that all pages have sufficiently different to other page of your website.
Regards,
BHAVESH.
I wrote another idea here http://www.gettingmorevisitors.com/2008/03/14/simple-ways-to-avoid-duplicate-content-penalties/ about another simple way to avoid those dupe content penalties
I have already specified the preffered URL in google webmaster accout but yet will implement this.
Well, you need to edit your .htaccess file and tell apache to redirect any visitor coming to your site to www.
e.g. yoursitename.com should be redirected to http://www.yoursitename.com
If you specify in google webmaster still the problem won’t get solved. I would recommend you to use .htaccess file instead.
Should I stop publish my articles on article directories? I used to publish my articles, but now I wander should I stop doing this, because the risk of duplicate content penalty.
Introspective,
First submit to ezinearticles.com, wait till the article is indexed by the search engines then submit it to other directories to get more backlinks. Your first submission will be the one that remains listed in the search engines.
You won’t get get penalized for duplicate content
if you follow this procedure.
website content is more responsible factor to bring the visitors onto your website ,convert visitors become client , website content should not be long, but it is to be informative reader will satisfied and again come onto your site ,related to the topic and product.
I cannot believe this will work!
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. 🙂 Cheers! Sandra. R.
I love your site. 🙂 Love design!!! I just came across your blog and wanted to say that I’ve really enjoyed browsing your blog posts. Sign: ndsam
Great tip you have provided in your blog.Cheers
Hello 🙂 I bookmarked this blog. Thanks heaps for this!… if anyone else has anything, it would be much appreciated.
! I hadn’t yet to think about the ultimately simple ways a search engine like Google worked in. The matter is that even though a spider looks at your page numerous times, it still takes a metric tonne of effort on your part to get your page to become “relevent” to the spiders. I guess this just adds to my knowledge of Google.
Good read, thanks for posting!
The 301 re-direct is the most search engine friendly way to do things and have done so many times in the past with no issues.
Good reading
-Adam
Hi, nice blog. I hope you can join our monthly blogging tournament.
Google has no such rule on “duplicate content”.
If your believing this, tosh check out google webmaster and this video about article spinning from a guy in Ireland:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpJBJILFglI
People who say this garbage don`t know what they are talking about.
Thank you for going over re-directs and duplicate content issues. I am not sure the article spinner above got much from it though.
I saw that SEO, SMO, and PPC form an interdependent triangle,
hello. Just wanted to let you know I like this article
I always try to take away my garbage sensibly but it’s usually demotivating whenever I check out just what many countries are doing to this world!
Google is also not giving any value to duplicate content. Great article.
Hello there.
First of all great post. I have a question. What is the best 301 permanent redirect choice?
1. redirect non-www to www
2. redirect www to non-www
As far as i know www is a subdomain right? So is it best to pick choice 2?
thanks in advance.
Duplication actually occurs on
duplicate domains
duplicate content
duplicate pages
It can be solved either by redirection or by using rel = canonical urls.
This article gives the light in which we can observe the reality. this is very nice one and gives in depth information
Good Site Thanks you, Good advice. Very useful tips