Your domain name may be causing a lower search engine ranking.

How is that possible, you ask?

Have you ever surfed to a website only to get an error message to the effect of “No website configured at this domain” or “Domain not available”? Annoying, isn’t it? If you didn’t just move on to something else, and the website content was of high interest to you, you may have experimented with adding a www. to the beginning of the URL if it wasn’t there to begin with - or dropping it if it was.

And that MAY have solved the problem. The trouble with this solution is that probably 50% to 67% of visitors won’t try, and that is a lot of people to lose.

To solve that problem, most hosting companies have set up the DNS (Domain Name Services) so that yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com point to the same directory, your web root directory. That eliminates the problem mentioned above.

But, it creates a whole new problem.

Search engines see yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com as two separate domains. Other websites around the Internet may link to you using either variation of the URL. For an example, let’s say there are 100 websites linking to your website, 50 of them use the www URL and 50 use the non-www URL.

The search engines catalog that as 50 links to one domain and 50 to another. And since incoming links are such a big part of establishing search engine rankings, you may be getting ranked a lot lower than you should - TWICE!

So, what can you do about it?

At the risk of sounding totally geeky, you can use the 301 Redirect. The 301 redirect is a script placed in the document root (web server directory) of your server that tells anyone (or anything) visiting that the redirected (secondary) domain is PERMANENTLY being redirected to the primary domain.

This satisfies the search engines quite nicely and consolidates the links that you can’t control from other websites so you get full credit for all incoming links to your site.

This is essential to do if there is ANY chance that other websites may link to you by more than one URL. For instance, I have a website at http://www.stovallphoto.com. It is also served by the domains stovallphoto.com, stovall-photo.com, and www.stovall-photo.com. If you paste any of the last three into your browser, you will notice that you are transparently redirected to www.stovallphoto.com. The same is true at http://AREIP.org, which is also served by AREIP.com, www.AREIP.org and www.AREIP.com. Click on any of the “secondary” domains listed and you will be instantly redirected to the “primary” domain.

It is the 301 Redirect that make this possible. I have put a page in the Member’s Information Area at OrangeCat.net that explains this in more detail and tells how you can install a 301 Redirect. The page is at:

http://orangecat.net/members/301_redirect.php

This is VERY different from the redirect that you get by using an http-equiv refresh or a PHP or ASP redirect. While they will send you to the correct location, they do NOT tell the search engine robots that the domains are one and the same. They merely change the location of the visitor.

If you don’t feel comfortable getting into the guts of your server configuration, we can do it for you - see the bottom of the page for specifics.

This is essential to do if you want to maximize your search engine rankings. It is one of those little details that goes a long way for a long time.

PS - If you are not on an OrangeCat server, it is possible that the instructions will work for you as well. You need to be able to locate and access your httpd.conf file and your web document root directory if you are on a UNIX or Linux system. If your web server runs Microsoft IIS, ask your systems administrator for details.