(973) 887-0778

Rank Magic

SEO for small and very small businesses.

Home » domains/URLs » Page 3

domains/URLs

by Leave a Comment

That Pesky “www” in Web Addresses

/ canonicalization, domains/URLs, redirects / Leave a Comment

You may realize that if you enter a URL like rankmagic.com into your browser you get to the same page as when you enter www.rankmagic.com. It doesn’t seem to matter which way you do it. But for the search engines, it can make a difference.

Background of the WWW prefix

WWW in URL

The WWW refers to the World Wide Web, which many people consider to be synonymous with the Internet. Technically, it’s not. The WWW runs on the internet like email, but is not the Internet itself. The “www” part of an Internet address isn’t usually required, though, so you normally can use it or not when typing a URL into the address bar of your browser.

Search Engine Implications of the WWW

Search engines see addresses with and without the “www” as separate addresses. Why should that matter? Because link authority is an essential factor in good ranking and use of the “www” can affect your link popularity. Here’s how:

Suppose you have 100 links pointing to http://example.com and another hundred links pointing to http://www.example.com. Search engines will see that each URL has 100 inbound links, and that’s all you’ll get credit for. However, if they all pointed to http://www.example.com you’d get credit for all 200 links.

That Pesky “www” in Web Addresses

Click To Tweet

As I’ve written in the past, it can actually be worse than that, as it’s possible to have four different URLS for your home page like this:

  1. example.com
  2. www.example.com
  3. example.com/index.html
  4. www.example.com/index.html

This problem of multiple addresses for the same web page is called canonicalization. We have a full discussion of it on our web site.

What To Do?

You can’t control how other people link to your site and whether they use the “www” in the address or not. But you can set up a permanent redirect so that any time they don’t use the “www”, the link gets directed to the “www” version of your web address. We have instructions on how to fix your home page canonical issues on our web site.

Aside from redirecting external links to the “www” version of your address, you should also make sure your internal links pointing to your home page do the same. It’s very common for home page links from other pages on your site to include the actual page, as in www.example.com/l (there are several possible alternatives to index.html that your site may use). You should make sure that  your own links to your home page don’t include that “index.html” part, and just point to www.example.com.

Read more about that pesky “www” and canonicalization here.

by 1 Comment

3 Lines of Code Can Improve Your Rankings

/ canonicalization, domains/URLs, redirects / 1 Comment

HTML codeMany webmasters and web site owners aren’t aware of this hidden killer of search engine rankings. The problem occurs when multiple URLs can access the same page on your site. And just 3 lines of code can fix it.

For example, all of the following are likely to point to the same page:

  • http://samplesite.com
  • http://www.samplesite.com
  • http://samplesite.com/index.html
  • http://www.samplesite.com/index.html

If other websites link to yours inconsistently (which will happen sooner or later), different versions of the same pages can get indexed in search engines. This forces the search engines to choose the best URL to rank. Your PageRank will be diluted by the fact that some links are going to different URLs for your page.

Do you have this problem? It’s easy to check. In your browser, navigate to www.yoursite.com (substituting your own domain, of course). Then go to yoursite.com (without the “www.”). If both go to the exact same URL (check the address box in your browser), then you’re in good shape. But if one displays your URL with the “www” and the other displays it without, then you have this problem.

3 Lines of Code Can Improve Your Search Visibility

Click To Tweet

How to Fix This

Growth of revenue from better online visibility via SEOFirst, choose which version you want to use — with or without the www. Then, have your webmaster insert the following at the beginning of your .htaccess file. (Don’t worry: your webmaster will know what that file is. Unfortunately, this only works if your site is hosted on a Unix or Linux server. If it’s hosted on a Windows server, your webmaster will have to check for the proper way to do this on your server.)

To use the with-www version of your site, use this code, substituting your domain as appropriate:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To use the without-www version of your site, use this (again substituting as appropriate):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That’s it! Just test to make sure it works.

Of course, you still need to make sure all the sites linking to yours are linking to the right version, and that if they’re linking to your home page they’re not including the actual page filename after the .com. But this little trick should take care of the worst of things.

[Update — Be sure to employ the same 3 lines of code when you migrate your site from an insecure “http://” prefix to a secure “https://” prefix.] [Read more…] about 3 Lines of Code Can Improve Your Rankings

by Leave a Comment

Be Alert for Domain Scams

/ domains/URLs, malware / Leave a Comment

domain scam alertTwo of our clients have come to us within the past few days to ask about bills they got in the mail that looked like invoices for domain name registration renewals. They came from Domain Listing Service, and close inspection shows they are for “Annual Website Search Engine Listing” at a cost of $75.

If you get one of these, don’t pay it!
[Update: As of 2022, 15 years after I wrote this article, this is still a thing. I personally got one of these scam emails just this month.]
They promise quarterly submissions to 25 major search engines … which won’t help your rankings in the least. But if any of our clients want that done, Rank Magic will do it for free. (Partly because that’s all it’s worth to you.)
The next questionable approach is a fax that looks very legalese and quotes an extensive excerpt from the United States Legal Code, Title 15. The scary headline says FINAL NOTICE OF DOMAIN EXTENSION and the fax will show your domain name prominently, but with a different extension. I’ve received several, including one listing RANKMAGIC.US for instance.
Beware an email claiming FINAL NOTICE OF DOMAIN EXTENSION.

Click To Tweet

What they’re offering is to allow you to reserve another version of your domain to prevent some other company from taking that domain and causing confusion among your customers. If you think that might be a problem, go ahead and register other domains — with .net, .org, .us, .biz, .tv, or whatever other top-level domain extensions you want.

The typical cost is $25/year apiece, but if you call the toll-free number on this fax, they’ll try to sell it to you for a 10-year term or a 5-year term. If you ask for the 1-year rate, they quote $35.

[Update: as of 2022, the cost of this is about $150. But it’s not worth a penny more than it was in 2007. Which is nothing.]

I plan to toss all of these right into the circular file.

by Leave a Comment

A Word About “WWW”

/ canonicalization, domains/URLs / Leave a Comment

Be consistent about the use of You can often navigate to a site by using the prefix “www.” or by skipping it. For instance, https://www.VCSsoftware.com and VCSsoftware.com both point to the same place.

However depending on the server configuration, they could point to different locations, so search engines can’t assume they’re the same. The folks at Sitemaps have a helpful article on this, albeit a bit technical for some.

Matt Cutts, the “Google Guy has a simple suggestion on his Google Blog: “The only thing I’d add to that answer is one recommendation: check your internal links and to make sure that they’re consistent (either all to www or all to non-www). That will also help search engines pick the root page that you prefer.”

In other words, pick one or the other (I like using the www) and make sure all the internal links on your web site — and as many incoming links from other web sites as you can influence — all use the same version. That way your web site will get proper credit for all those links.