Domain Redirects

Choose one you prefer

  • www
  • non-www






The Problem?

The moment your new website went live, you can go to your homepage using any of these URLs:

  1. http://example.com/
  2. http://example.com/index.php
  3. http://www.example.com/
  4. http://www.example.com/index.php

It is not search engine friendly.

Why?

Search engines get confused because your website uses more than one web address. To be search engine friendly, your website must only have one address. Just like your house only has one address and you never tell people various addresses if you want them to reach your home. So for your website to be more seo-friendly, you should treat it like your home, office or any place of business. Each home, office or any place of business always has only one physical address because each is in one permanent location only.

The solution

Choose one address you want yourself, your visitors, and search engines to remember.

For example, you can choose yourwebsite.com instead of www.yourwebsite.com because you want it shorter. You decide.

And, between yourwebsite.com/index.html and yourwebsite.com, which do you think customers will find easier to remember?

Which would be easier to manually type into the web browser's address bar on mobile phones? Just the same, you decide.

What matters in this particular aspect of SEO is properly setting up whatever preferred URL you want as your permanent address for your website. And, to NEVER let people see the web address that you didn't choose. Not even the search engines. If people can use a URL to visit a page on your website, so can search engine robots.

A SEO friendly redirect is a permanent redirect which you can also call a “301 redirect”. Once you've properly setup a 301 redirect, you can give yourself a pat on the back because now you know one of the two ways an SEO expert can eliminate duplicate content issues on a website. The other way is through the rel="canonical" element.

Use this tool

This tool will let you set your chosen address. You, your visitors, and search engines, will be shown only your chosen address all the time.

How?

There is a file located in the root directory of your server named as .htaccess (take note that the dot is in the front of the name and nothing else comes before it). You can add a few lines of code into that file to set the preferred permanent address you choose. Selecting to have a www address or non-www address is all it takes to make Domain Redirect tool write the code with instruction that your server shall follow to 301 redirect any combination of addresses with or without www to your preferred web address.

Act Now

If you can see your website using more than one URLs, people and search engines can do the same. And, if people and search engines can see your homepage in a number of ways, they are also likely to bookmark, share and index your homepage using all the URLs that are available to them.

The effect on the quality of user experience may still depend on how well people know your website. But for search engines. they will take duplicate content guidelines seriously.

So, for better user experience and search engine rankings, you better implement domain 301 redirects via your .htaccess file in the root folder.



You may say your site is just fine. But if you want higher search engine rankings, search engines have guidelines you must follow before you can expect to be highly visible on first page SERPs.

The above code can help you implement seo-friendly domain 301 redirects on your website. We encourage you to act now as we wish to see you on the top 10 search results soon.