A Simple Fix to Improve Your Google Rank

This one piece of advice is extremely important for every blogger and every website developer alike. Every website should take care of this one item as soon as they launch the site yet very few actually do. So what is it that every site needs but most don’t have? The answer to that is simple: a redirect that adds www to any address on your site that doesn’t already have it.

I know. I know. That sounds really complicated. Let me bring this whole concept down to a dummy level so that it will be foolproof for anyone to implement on their website. I promise that by the time you are done with this post, you will have no problem implementing this on your website in a matter of about two minutes!

Why is this so important?

Believe it or not, this actually has several very important functions for your website. Google and other similar search engines are constantly scanning your site in an attempt to get fodder for their search results.

We all know this. But did you know that Google’s programming is set to penalize sites that contain duplicate content? That means that if your website has two pages that contain the exact same content, Google will very likely refuse to list either one. This concept holds true for other major search engines as well.

Without using a redirect on your non-www addresses, Google will interpret your entire site as a duplicate. It will see the page ‘http://www.sitesketch101.com’ and ‘http://sitesketch101.com’ as two different pages with the exact same content which will instantly penalize you and reduce the number of visitors that you can get through their search engine. Notice that the only difference between those two addresses is that one of them is preceded by the ‘www’ and the other is not.

So how do we do it?

So with that in mind, let’s create a fix to this issue that only takes about a minute or two to implement. Let’s force every attempt to access our site to automatically add the www to the front of the url. This will cause Google, Yahoo, and others to index our content and allow potential visitors to find our site through their indexes.

In the root directory of your website you should find a file called “.htaccess”. If you don’t already have one then simply create a new text document and name it “.htaccess”. Notice that this filename has an extension but no actual file name preceding the extension. It’s a bit unusual, but that’s the way that the internet is set up.

Once you have located or created this file, open it in either Dreamweaver, Notepad, or whatever else you may use as your preferred code editor. Once you have the file open there are only two things that you have to do. First, locate the following code and if it doesn’t already exist (such as if you had to create the file from scratch) then add this code on the very first line:

RewriteEngine On

Second and finally, insert the following code immediate after the code above. Be sure to replace “sitesketch101.com” with the domain name or your site. When you are finished simply re-save the file to the root directory of your website.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sitesketch101.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sitesketch101.com/$1 [L,R=301]

When you are finished the completed code should look like this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sitesketch101.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sitesketch101.com/$1 [L,R=301]

That is all it takes. Now go to your browser and type in the domain of your site without the www in front of it. It should automatically redirect you to the url with the www. Most users will never even notice this…but Google will…and Yahoo…and…well you get the point!