Does the domain containing www. in front have anything to do with PR and link popularity? Are there any advantages of containing the www. or not?
no difference. but it's good to promote only 1 so you need to choose since they're treated as different sites in Google. the general public is programed for www.domain.com to i would opt for the www.
oh really? could you briefly tell me how to do that? I already have my main domain redirecting to /forums
google '301 redirect' should tell you how to do it properly and doing it for http:// and not WWW might be tricky, i dont remember off top of my head to be honest
hmm theres no www to http:// however there IS http:// to www. when link building i have only used http:// and not www. since I wanted to only promote one... should i redirect to www.?
I usually using .htaccess like this to handle this issue RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301] Code (markup):
What you really need to do is look at where your links are pointing to are the majority www.domain.com or domain.com. That should help you decide which way to 301 redirect. The one I use in my .htaccess file is, this only works for apache hosting and not iis or another web server. for domain.com to www.domain.com I use RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
okay new question... if i have my main domain domain.net redirected to domain.net/forums in the cpanel, should use 301 redirect from domain.net to domain.net/forums as well? or just domain.net --> www.domain.net which redirects to www.domain.net/forums? okay.. thats kinda confusing, please let me know if i have to reword this EDIT: after looking at my .htaccess these codes were found RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^url.net$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.url.net$ RewriteRule ^/?$ http://url.net/forums [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^url.net$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.url.net$ RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://url/forums [R=301,L] Code (markup): does this mean that both www. and http is redirected to http://url.net/forums? therefore I do not have to worry about anything?
I would do it in 2 steps RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/forum/$1 [R=301,L] What this does is first if the domain is without the www then it redirects. Then it checks to see if the domain is www and redirects it to the forum.
okay, so that makes more sense actually.. should i just replace my code with the one you have provided?
Does your old code work? I see it also redirects the index.php to the forums which is a good idea as well. If it works then I would say leave it alone.