Do you have multiple domains pointing to your website? From an SEO standpoint you shouldn’t have them all pointing to your document root directory because this might be interpreted as duplicate content by the search engines or you might even get a mixup of pages distributed over several domains and subdomains (like example.com and www.example.com) in the organic search results.

If you are using Apache and have access to the RewriteModule you should configure the VirtualHost like this so that all domains and subdomains are redirected to the main hostname via a search engine friendly HTTP 301 redirect:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com
DocumentRoot /srv/www/example.com/htdocs
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAlias example.com
ServerAlias www.example.org
ServerAlias example.org
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com$1 [L,R=301]
…
</VirtualHost>

This will redirect all requests not going directly to http://www.example.com to that hostname. So even if someone enters http://example.org/index.php the server will issue a redirect to http://www.example.com/index.php.

Of course this also works if someone links to your page with a link like http://example.com/file.gif. In that case the redirect will be issued to http://www.example.com/file.gif. Google likes that.

Tags: apache, google, rewriterules, search engine friendy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Development, SEO, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.