Site 301 Redirect for full credit

6 replies
  • SEO
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Hello Warriors,

I just read on a different forum that google looks at the site differently when you have a "www" or without. So they advised to add an entry in .htaccess file and setup a "301 redirect".

Is this standard practice and do you all do this?

Thanks in advance

Shiv
#301 #credit #full #redirect #site
  • Profile picture of the author PhilipSEO
    Yes, it's standard practice. An alternative would be to use "canonical" links (follow the link to see Google's instructions) or to set the preferred version of the URL in Google Webmaster Tools.

    For more information on URL canonicalization, watch this Matt Cutts video:
    About rel="canonical" - Webmaster Tools Help
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  • Originally Posted by shiv_kumar View Post

    Hello Warriors,

    I just read on a different forum that google looks at the site differently when you have a "www" or without. So they advised to add an entry in .htaccess file and setup a "301 redirect".

    Is this standard practice and do you all do this?

    Thanks in advance

    Shiv
    Absolutely... This is called URL canonicalization. It is the FIRST thing I do when I get a new client or build a new site of my own. And it's the most basic yet most overlooked SEO technique around. I have actually seen big consulting companies like iCrossing overlook this correction when engaged in large client contracts.

    Each page on your site should have one URL that can be used to reference it called the canonical (preferred) URL. All other non-canonical URLs that can be used to render that same page should be 301 redirected to the canonical URL for that page.
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  • BTW: I would fix URL canonicalization issues using 301 redirects, NOT using the rel="canonical" link element. The rel="canonical" link element was created to be used as an absolute last resort to fix these types of issues, and is not the "preferred" method.

    Rel="canonical" was made for sites that cannot implement 301 redirects because their platform doesn't support it (perhaps they are running on an old version of IIS with no server side scripting... or they are hosted on a free web host that doesn't allow 301 redirects if you move your site to its own self-hosted domain). It was also designed for sites that have URLs that would be too complicated to fix using 301 redirects (like large ecommerce sites that use complex query string parameters to render the various pages).

    The big drawbacks with rel="canonical" are:

    1) Though all 3 search engines "said" they would support it when it was announce 2 yrs ago, ONLY Google has implemented support for it. In fact, Google even now supports cross-domain rel="canonical" links. So, using rel="canonical" ONLY fixes the problem at Google, and not with the other search engines.

    2) When using rel="canonical" the non-canonical versions of the URL still appear in the browser. So people copying those URLs from their browser and pasting them into their own sites to create links will continue to link to you with the non-canonical versions of your URL.

    301 redirects have been the preferred method to fix URL canonicalization issues forever. All search engines know how to handle 301 redirects and transfer credit from the non-canonical URLs to the canonical URL as a result of encountering the 301 redirect. So it fixes canonicalization issues across ALL search engines. And as an added bonus, the 301 redirect causes only the canonical URL to appear in browsers. So it puts an end to the perpetuation of using non-canonical URLs to link to your site.
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  • Profile picture of the author chrisyates
    My take on this is that it's better to keep backlinks consistently going to the "www" version. It's interesting that the "link:" command on Google may give you different totals with and without the "www".
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