My site is http://website.com, but most links point to http://www.website.com

My site, http://www.esgameservers.com, uses http://website.com for its URLs instead of http://www.website.com.

The problem is, most of my links point to http://www.esgameservers.com instead of http://esgameservers.com. I would normally change my .htaccess so all links point to http://www.esgameservers.com, but I have a very popular page that has over 2800 quality backlinks pointing to http://website.com subpage of my site.

Would it be a good idea to change my .htaccess so that http://www. links redirect to http:// links? What .htaccess code would I use to accomplish this? Considering most of my links point to http://www.website.com, would I notice a positive SEO effect by redirecting the links?

 

you can use 301 redirect for redirecting with www option to without www option

 

Just change your "Preferred domain" in google webmaster central.

 

The only problem is that does not help on the other SE'S

 

301 redirect www to non-www

Try this in your .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.esgameservers.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://esgameservers.com.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Since it is kind of a long domain, I would go with non-www anyway.

 

Thanks for the help guys. I looked over my site and all my menu links point to http://www and most of the links to my site's homepage point to http://www.
Would changing to http://domain.com be a bad idea because of this?

 

Well ofcourse...But google holds tha major market share. So i wouldn't be too bothered.

 

I would, there's been too many horror stories of peoples domains being de-indexed after altering the prefered domain in Webmaster Tools.

Never use it, always use 301 re-direct via .htaccess for setting prefered URL's.