Upcoming articles on From the Front-End

It’s been a while since my last post but I haven’t been idle. I’ve got plenty of articles coming up so watch this space for:

The low down on d.Construct 2007
Enhancing Web Standards sites with flash
Case Study: Experiments in SEO
Working on the move: Extreme Research

www vs non-www (301 redirect)

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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