I have noticed in reviewing my Google Stats on DP that I have a completely different PR ranking and Backlinks readout depending on if I add the WWW in front of my websites URL or not... As a matter of fact the backlinks that appear for my website URL which I always have posted without the WWW dont appear on my WWW.URL stats and versa-visa. I presume then that this means those links dont count toward page weight, page rank or anything else..? So Google and I assume every other Search Engine out there will read my website: http://1800sunstar.com/ and http://www.1800sunstar.com/ as two different websites..? Fortunately my webhosting service does route inquires to my website with or without the WWW otherwise folks would get a 404..? Does this mean I'll have to review all of my link partners to see if they're posting my URL with the WWW and have them modified so I receive the full value of my PR and Backlinks..? Thanks in advance for any insights...
Actually I dont want the WWW so I want to direct all WWW links to my homepage URL at http://1800sunstar.com/
I just noticed that because of digitalpoint blogfeed http://searchengineblog.net is being indexed and not http://www.searchengineblog.net
Michael, this should do what you want in the .htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.1800sunstar\.com RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://1800sunstar.com/$1 [R=permanent,L] This rewrite rule looks for URLs with http://www.1800sunstar.com and rewrites them using http://1800sunstar.com. You should see the URL change in the browser address window if it is working correctly.
Aloha TechEvangelist I'm using Yahoo Hosting with their advanced file manager. Is this something I can do there..?
I went through this same issue with Yahoo a few months ago. I had Yahoo as a host and they do not allow you to edit the .htaccess file, do cron jobs ect. However they manage to charge you more than most hosts for fewer services and poor cutomer service because of name recognition. I would suggest finding a new host. Anyway thats my 2 cents about Yahoo hosting.
Thanx for the feeback Carowan but not being in a position to change my hosting service right now I'd like to be able to do something about this asap. I was told that I could do a 301 redirect but I dont know if that would tally the linkpartners and visitors I get to http://www.1800sunstar.com and credit them in my stats to http://1800sunstar.com This is really what I'd like to do without having to go to every linkpartner and ask them to delete the WWW from my URL listings on their resource sites... Still not sure the best way to handle this one. Any other suggestions please..?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you should be able to use the code tech avangelist gave you , place it in notepad, call the file .htaccess (make sure you leave out the .txt that notepad assigns) and just FTP the file on the root of your host server.
well as mentioned above I'm using Yahoo as my host server which has an HTML advanced file manager that I use to code my websites. Not having done this before it looks like I would assign a file with the extension as follows: ? filename.htaccess CODE: <html> Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.1800sunstar\.com RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://1800sunstar.com/$1 [R=permanent,L] </html>
That's it. (make sure the file name is only .htaccess nothing else) Upload it on your server than test it out. Hope it works.
Thanx Kyle and everyone that responded... I'll try this today and advise. Be interesting to see if this will in fact improve my backlink stats down the line.
Just one note, since no one mentioned it: The html tags should not be there, since it's not a HTML document.
Thanks nullbit, I'm into this part of the job for the first time and that particular piece of tag had me completely baffled.
Tech, you're writing like this: but elsewhere I've seen it written like this: [L,R] Is there a difference? Does it matter - seems not to - what order the "R" and "L" is written in, but I have no idea what they do specifically
Well I've learned quite alot more than I expected to know about file extensions today. It seems "Carowan" might've been correct in that I could not find "htaccess" support on the Yahoo server. I suppose that "htaccess" isn't really a file extension though because they usually go "filename.html" or "filename.php" etc yes? Well there's apparently no filename with "htaccess" and when I tried to save the code provided by "TechEvangelist" the system asked me for a filename... I feel like I'm pretty much back where I started as far as my original dilemma goes. [i.e: how to get backlinks and PR credit for my http://1800sunstar.com/ for referrals and hits that go to http://www.1800sunstar.com/] At any rate Yahoo does support quite a few file ext's and programs. Here's their list of supported file ext's I found: Which file types does Yahoo! Web Hosting support? Below you will find the current list of file types supported by Yahoo! We will add to this list periodically as new file types become more common across the Web. EXTFILE TYPE
.htaccess isn't a file extension. It is a file. Specifically, it is a hidden file. The (dot) before the name of the file signifies this, you can hide any file in this manner simply by naming it .michael. You wouldn't be able to see it normally, and certainly not by browser. What you could try to do with your html/text creator is create a file, name it htaccess.txt, put your htaccess stuff in it. When you're done; save it as the htaccess file, then try to rename it to .htaccess. It sounds like Yahoo doesn't allow hidden files by it's users though.