For anyone that hasn’t already heard me ramble on about page ranks, it’s a number that Google assigns to your website based upon the amount of incoming/outgoing links, search engine optimization, and traffic. The higher the score, on a scale of 1-10, the more various ad networks will pay you.
Quite a few of us in the Forum hop on over to a page rank checker every month or so in hopes of a boost in our rank. You can check your current number at a site like PageRank Checker.
What you may notice is that your URL with and without the www. can have different page ranks. This is because some people may have forgotten to include the www. when linking to your site, or they copied and pasted exactly what was in the address bar in their browser.
If you were to visit a couple of our member’s websites, you’d notice that it doesn’t automatically include the www. if you don’t type it (Aaron’s BlackRock’s Business Ideas and Kevin’s KMull.com for example). Whereas, another young go getter’s site, Kineda, does automatically do it.
So how did Terry at Kineda get this to work? Quite simply.
1. Open up notepad or your simple web editor of choice.
2. Paste the following into it:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
3. Replace “yourwebsite” with your website’s URL, obviously.
4. Save this file as “.htaccess”. Don’t include a txt or html file extension. Just “.htaccess”.
5. Upload this to the root directory of your webhost’s server. May be /www or /httpdocs. Wherever your main index file for your website is located.
6. That’s it! Try visiting your website without the www. and you should automatically be forwarded to the one with.
In some instances, you may already have an .htaccess file in your root folder and be prompted to replace it when you upload the new one. DON’T REPLACE IT. Download the current one from your server, open it in a text editor, and add the code above to the bottom of the file. You may have other functions set for your server that are necessary, so don’t delete an existing .htaccess file, just add to it.
This is one of the first things you should do with every new website or blog you launch. For the two minutes it takes, you can save yourself a lot of worry down the road when your website without the www. has a better rank than with. And I’ll admit it, up until reminding myself with this post, YGG has paid the price of not following this tutorial. Lesson learned.
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