Ask Marketing Experts search engine marketing forum

[DanThies]

Some folks will link to "www.yourdomain.com," others will just link to your "domain.com". Believe it or not, Google sees those as two distinct URLs. They also see www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/index.html as two distinct URLs.

You can't solve all the world's problems with mod_rewrite, but if you have mod_rewrite or an equivalent, you can at least make sure that all the links to "domain.com" end up translated as "www.domain.com"

Here's an example rewrite rule using the domain for ask-marketing-experts - stick this in your .htaccess file and get all those links pointing to the same place:

[code:1:0116215813]Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.ask-marketing-experts\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.ask-marketing-experts.com/$1 [R=permanent,L] [/code:1:0116215813]

[7thDsites]

What an awesome an overlooked post!

Thanks for the htaccess file code splice... as you may or may not know this was a topic presented at the last SE convention in San Jose.

.....

I would also like to suggest that another option for this would be to ask some link partners to link as www.domain and others without the www.

This will give you some variance in the links, but the same ultimate linking benefits, without making all of the links the same... something that the search engines could construe as building links to artificially inflate link pop.

Vary your link's anchor text to degrees, utilize your keyword phrases, and do not create the appearance with your link partners, to the search engines, that they have been put together by a link building firm or seo because everyone is linking to you in an identical manner.