A lot of bloggers have been talking about ways to help see your site as ONE site and not two. (Example: http://www. newsnotion.com and http:// newsnotion.com)
I am going to gather all of this information and stick it into one easy post. Here are some ways to avoid Google dividing your pagerank and serps in half.
Plugins
-Enforce www. Preference was the first plugin I came across. “This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.”
-Duplicate Content Cure is a plugin that prevents search engines from indexing sites like your archives or categories that is seen as duplicate content.
Edit Your .htaccess file
Open up your .htaaccess file and add these lines of code if you prefer to use www in front of your domain:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Webmaster Tools
Everyone should have their website’s sitemap published on Google’s Webmaster Tools program and with that program there are a lot of helpful tools to make sure your website is being indexed by Google, etc. One of the features is to choose the preference of url you want to enforce. Make sure to select one as soon as possible. Once signed in to Webmaster Tools, on the left sidebar click on Preferred Domain.
Resources:
Credit goes to the following posts for helping me discover these ways:
Two Plugins to Help Fight Duplicate Content
If you have any other ideas that will help, let me know and I’ll add it.
Excellent tip! I love the Enforce www vs no www plugin.
Thanks.
Yeah I didn’t realize that I was seriously hurting my blog by not choosing between www or no.
I wonder if you still run into this particular kind of dupe content if you’re careful to only link to your site with www and make sure you have www only links in your G sitemap. *shrugs*
Not sure, but I’d rather be safe than sorry!
Good point.