Canonical issues: www vs. non-www January 4, 2008
Posted by Guy Cook in : Blogs, Frontpage, internet-marketing , trackbackA portion of some good spider information at http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm
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Canonical issues: www vs. non-www There’s been much talk lately of canonical issues and search engines. This is where both the www and non-www versions of your pages are listed in a search engine. This is said to possibly trigger a duplicate content penalty and/or split page rank. If this is of concern to you, you may wish to use the following, but be aware that you may suffer a further loss of traffic while the engines sort out what’s what. This example is where you wish to direct all non-www traffic to www. Add the following to your .htaccess file.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Ensure that all your links to folders always end in a trailing / if there is no filename after that link.
FrontPage users: in addition to the above, you’ll also need to change the .htaccess files in: _vti_bin
_vti_bin /_vti_adm
_vti_bin/ _vti_aut Replace “Options None” to “Options +FollowSymLinks” Those folders are part of your FrontPage extensions on the server, so you’ll need to gain access via FTP. Note: test, test and test again after making changes. Test *immediately* after implementing 301 redirects. If you find anything wrong, remove the redirect immediately. User a server header checker to ensure that you’re getting a correct 301 response when using the old URL.
– end paste — Visit the page above for more information, to have all of the story.
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