October 28th, 2006
Most sites are accessible through either http://website.com as well as http://www.website.com. If anyone gave you a URL without the www would you assume that the same domain with a www would take you do a different site? Of course not. However, search engines are not always that smart. They may see http://fromthefrontend.co.uk and http://www.fromthefrontend.co.uk as two different sites.
Why is this a problem? Well it could have a negative effect on your search engine ranking. The “two sites” maybe viewed as a duplicate entry or you may have in cases promoted a www version and in others a non-www version without noticing and thus your efforts are diluted.
The solution?
Redirect traffic from your non-www to your www url (or visa versa). There are many ways to redirect a page - meta refresh, an info page advising to go to the correct url etc. But in this case your best option is the 301 redirect.
There are 2 main reasons
1) It is search engine friendly and will preserve your exisiting ranking
2) Most webhosts do not enable you to direct traffic for www and non-www to different destinations so you couldn’t put an info page or metta refresh in place to redirect the traffic
3) Using the wrong method can get you BANNED from google as Business.com discovered. Check out the full story on webpro
Fortunately the 301 redirect is easy enough to implement. You will need to be able to use .htaccess files (i.e using a Linux server running Apache and the Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled).
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October 23rd, 2006
What happens when a user is sent a link to your site (or manually types your URL) there’s a typo? What happens if you have a broken link on your site? What happens when a search engine brings up results for your site but it’s for a page you’ve removed?
The visitor is presented with their browsers (or webhosts) ghastly 404 page with no link to the correct page. The chances are the visitor may not bother to try and strip the URL down to your domain and search for the page, they’ll just close you page and look else where.
What can be done to avoid this? A custom 404 page! And example can be seen at MyPetsite.co.uk/ - enter anything random at the end and the custom 404 page will appear.
The .htaccess technique.
This method is designed to work on an apache server with html pages.
This technique can also be used to create different error pages for 403 - forbidden, 401 - unauthorised, 501 - Unable to connect to server etc. However, if simplicity is what you are after than you can have all such errors can be directed to the same page.
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