I have lost Several hundred to a couple thousand of dollars due to GoDaddy's poor advice and I need help fixing this Really simple (for someone who knows DNS). I wanted my site askthetrainer.com (Like seemingly every other site online) to always show up as www.askthetrainer.com to avoid duplicate content penalties and confusion... I called Godaddy and their "Tech support" walked me through the process and my site was promptly down over night (as they said the changes could take 24-48 hours to take effect). It turns out they had me change the wrong settings and put my site in a loop. They had me remedy this with a domain forward which has further caused my site to lose rankings because I think it is seen by the search engines as 2 versions www. and http:// which is EXACTLY what I was trying to avoid w/ my initial call to godaddy support... I have posted a job on elance and have had 0 offers to fix this. I'm looking for an expert in SEO and hosting, etc. who can with 110% confidence help me remedy this problem (with the goals of getting my search engine ranking back) whether it requires creating an HTACESS file or whatever...
Linux server although I have MS FRONTpage extensions installed.... I know there are essentially 3 ways to handle this.... 1. do a proper 301 redirect, 2. Use an HTaccess file to do a 301 redirect and 3. Use canonical tags... I need to use the very best method to try to get my search engine traffic back...
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^askthetrainer\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.askthetrainer.com/$1 [R=301,L] enter this to your htaccess file. Also make sure your google webmaster account has the preferred url set up correctly. regards, lucccy