	Home Web Hosting domains Domains

Customer Support

Search for keywords:

Browse by category:

How can I make it clear to search engines that
mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com are the same site?

Some search engine optimization (SEO) tests may advise you to make mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com appear as the same site to a search engine by using a permanent redirect. One way to do this is with Apache's mod_rewrite:

Open a text editor (such as Windows' Notepad or Mac's TextEdit) and create a file named '.htaccess' that contains the following text:
```
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.mydomain.com$ [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
```
Upload the file to the /htdocs directory on mydomain.com. NOTE: Make sure that once it is uploaded the file is still called .htaccess. If it is not, rename it.

The rewrite rule above is equivalent to telling search engines, "Any requests for www.mydomain.com should be permanently redirected to http://mydomain.com," validating that they are in fact the same site.

User-Contributed Notes
There are no user-contributed notes for this topic.

Related Questions:

Why does my website just say "Error 403 Forbidden"?

How do I protect a directory with .htaccess?

How can I show a default page other than index.html?

How do I stop people from getting directory listings when I dont have an index page?

What do the different HTTP Status Codes like 200, 304, 404, 401, 403 mean?

How do I protect a directory with mod_auth_mysql?

What options are configured with Apache and what can I do with .htaccess files?

How do I stop other websites from using my bandwidth while they steal images, flash, etc. from my site?

Which Apache modules are installed?

How can I make apache recognize different MIME types?

How do I make my own Error Documents to replace the default ones like 404 Not Found?

The webservers' Gzip compression is messing up my XML or Flash files for Netscape 4 browsers. How do I turn off compression?

How do I get different character sets to display correctly?

Why am I getting a 412 Precondition Failed from a website?

What webserver do you run?

Will I have access to raw logfiles?

My mod_rewrite rules make my website stop loading.

I created a symbolic link, and now I am getting a 404 errors.

How do I stop the server from automatically correcting spelling mistakes in URLs or offering multiple choices for documents?

How do I protect my website from comment spam?

How do I redirect traffic to another web page?

How do I enforce the use of SSL on my website?

Why do my mod_security rules cause intermittent Internal Server Errrors?

Browse Categories:

Getting Started, FTP, Telnet/SSH, Moving Domains, E-mail, Traffic Reports, Mailing Lists, Apache, PHP, CGI, Other Server-Side Scripting, MySQL Database, Imaging Libraries, Other Software, Billing & Terms, Control Panel, E-commerce, Pre-Sales