Can anyone explain how to make a redirect for the domain.com vs the www.domain.com? Will this help with my rankings? Thank you!
If your site is hosted on Linux (not Windows) you can do it with a .htacess file. If you already have a file called .htaccess in the root directory on your server, add this code to it (replacing domain.com in both place with your domain name, of course). Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc] rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc] If you don't have a .htaccess file, go into Notepad and copy this code into it. Save it as .htaccess (you need the . at the beginning) and upload that file to your root directory. Yes, it will help with rankings because it will consolidate inbound links. Without it, the search engines treat domain.com and www.domain.com as two separate sites. Good luck!
Thank you! When I do this, it shows in my root as .htaccess.txt and doesn't seem to be redirecting. Is there some other way that I need to save it?
It worked! I removed the .txt extension and now it works. Thank you. Should I change the settings in google webmaster tools from both non www and www to just www? Or is that unrelated?
You no longer need to your redirect in this manner. The engines have released a new Canonical Tag that will take care of this for you at the page level. I wrote up and article about this for my company. Take a look. http://www.searchmarketingtrends.com/newsletters/smtrends/137.aspx