You have 2 websites, even if you don’t know it.

Check this out.  One of my websites still has this HUGE SEO blunder.  Can you spot the difference between these two links?

http://fulltimerblog.com

http://www.fulltimerblog.com 

OK, that’s a pretty easy thing to spot.  One of the addresses has a www in it.  And, although this might not seem like a big deal, let me tell you why it is:

Why you should give a damn about your site showing up for www and without a www too:

The problem with this is that Google sees that page as two seperate pages.  So if you’ve got 20 people linking to your page that looks like this: http://www.yuppypants.com and 25 people linking to the same page but without the www that looks like this : http://yuppypants.com then you are going to have some problems.  The problems are going to arise because Google sees these as competing pages!  So instead of having a whopping 45 links to one page, you have two pages with half the links each competing with each other.  That’s no good.

How do you fix this?

Ultimately you are going to decide on keeping either www or no www. Then, you just redirect the version you don’t want to the version you do want.

For instance, for Daily SEO dot org, I chose to go with no www.  So if you type in www.dailyseo.org, a 301 redirect automatically takes you to http://dailyseo.org.  The good news is that a 301 redirect will also pass along linkjuice, so even if someone is kind enough to link to me, but links to www.dailyseo.org instead, the linkjuice will still go along to the no-www page.  Got it?

The nitty-gritty of fixing this problem: If you have Wordpress, it is as easy as installing this plugin.  If you don’t have Wordpress, then its more complicated fix is here.

For a longer discussion and argument on this topic, head over here.

Tags:
301, dot org, google, linkjuice, redirect, search engine optimization, seo, webmaster, www