Checking around the blogosphere a came across quite a lot blogs, especially new blogs from newbie blogger, I realize that the vast majority didn’t have a favorite domain set.

Choosing a favorite domain or choosing your url to be displayed as www. domain . com without www is very quick task to do and very important. Reasons are inside the post.

Why to pick up one?

We’re always saying that, in order to increase SERPs, backlinks are crucial, apart from a decent on page seo and quality content.

This is true, but to get the maximum profit from seo juice it’s necessary to set a fixed domain, choosing whether your site’s url will be displayed along with www or without www.

It’s very important to pick up one and not leave both, because, as an example, you’ll get two different pagerank, one to the www version and another one to the non-www version, as backlinks will go to both versions. Your blog will look more professional too.

The first option to do it is using Google Webmaster’s Tools, from the configuration panel. You’ll only need to verify both sites are yours, www and without www, then choose which is your favorite one.

This just means that if the spider finds a link to your site that’s using the www version, but you want your site to be displayed and indexed without www and have specified it on the Google Webmaster’s Tools, the bot will see it and crawl it as a non www backlink, so you’ll get the PR juice where you’ve specified it.

Apart from that, we can set a 301 redirect, so that when a reader type, let’s say, the non-www version, it will be redirected to the version set, in this case, the www version.

Sounds pretty complicated, but it’s not.

To do the 301 redirect you’ll only need to edit the .htaccess on your root folder, and add the following code:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. your site . whatever
RewriteRule (.*) http://www. yout site . whatever/$1 [R=301,L]

If you want your site without www, just remove the www on the code.

Make sure that before doing any changes you make a quick copy from your htaccess file, just to avoid any surprises.

Can one version be better than the other?

No. Just make sure you’ve a favorite one.

Now, all your problems around domains and www or non-www are finished. It’s very easy and quick to fix so do it ASAP, because you can get hurt.

Thanks for reading.

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