Debates have waged across the internet on whether or not the “www” should be forced in front of a domain, or not. “To www or not to www, that is the question”. Search engines consider http://PromotingMom.com and http://www.PromotingMom.com as different websites. As a result, if your website has been linked to from other websites using a mix of the two URLs you are effectively splitting the potential benefit of valuable link popularity.

Trust me, with Moments of Elegance early on I didn’t realize this was an issue until I got slapped with a duplicate content penalty by Google. Basically think of every single page on your site having 2 versions – the www.domain.com version, and the domain.com version. In recent years it appears that google has gotten smarter at handling these and doesn’t (usually) slap such a nasty penalty on sites anymore, but trust me. Its an easy fix, and worth putting into place so you don’t have to think or worry about it. I know its been keeping you up at night.

We recommend using the www version of your domain.

Using a 301 redirect on the ?non-www? version of the URL, which is essentially a ?permanent? redirect in server talk, you can effectively consolidate all of your links to a single URL (or at least a single url structure – you do want to get links to multiple pages on your site, just not multiple variations of a single page). This consolidation will serve to increase your website’s chances of obtaining and maintaining top rankings.
You need to add one of the following scripts to your .htaccess files (one or the other, NOT BOTH):

To redirect http://example.com to http://www.example.com:

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

To redirect http://www.example.com to http://example.com:

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

Don’t make the mistake of ignoring this. It might look daunting but it is a quick and easy fix, that will maintain the power of your linking.

Go WWW!

Ashley R