With Google stands as the most used search engine of all time, here’s a little SEO that anyone of us can perform on our own. It’s easy and also highly important in helping our page indexing. More index, more traffic, more revenue :-)

www and Non-www

Most of us would think they are the same, thus assuming

• www.domain.com, and
• domain.com

are the same. Actually they are not. In search engine point of view, they are treated differently. Its’s up to the webserver. www and non-www can return totally different websites. Here is an example, www.phpicalendar.com and phpicalendar.com, both return different website.

Even if www and non-www return the same website, that still doesn’t mean its safe or good enough. When

• www.domain.com/blog/seo-tips/
• domain.com/blog/seo-tips/

returns the same result in Google index, they will not like it. Very high chance that the content will be placed under Supplemental Index.

Supplemental Index

Definition of Wikipedia says "Supplemental Result is a supplementary Google search Index of less important web pages according to the Google’s PageRank". Here’s how a supplemental result looks like:

Supplemental results do not cause a Google penalty but because they are treated as less important, they will lose their PageRanks.

301 Redirect

Your site is index by Google robots that crawls your site frequently. These robots will treat www and non-www differently, and if both have the same content, it will be treated as duplicates. 301 Redirect is one of the most commonly used method to solve this.

Under your web folder public_html/ look for a filename call .htaccess. If there is no such file, you will need to create one. Open up and insert the following script:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

This will force all visits, including robots to take the www.domain.com even if they access your site through domain.com. A good way to find out if its working is to type the domain without www on the browser url bar, hit enter and see if it changes to http://www.domain.com when the website loads up.