Redirect root domain to www

[SeaDrive]

I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below.   Does anyone have a solution to this?  I'm not 100% sure what to do.  Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not?  Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages.

"Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com  which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate."

Thanks

[JSTRANDELL]

Both yes and no. It doesn't directly hurt your ranking to use your root domain for web, but it can affect your rankings to use both www. and the root domain. Typically what most people do is to redirect either www. or the root domain to the other, with the most common being redirecting the root domain with a HTTP 301 to the www.

In your case, this means that everyone visiting brickmarkers.com would be redirected to www.brickmarkers.com. This is helpful from a SEO perspective, as the "link juice" will be passed from brickmarkers.com to www.brickmarkers.com, consolidating all of your ranking power to one domain, instead of splitting it up over two.

The problem described in the quotation you included is however that you are tracking rankings for www.brickmarkers.com, but that it may sometimes be brickmarkers.com that shows up in the serp, and therefore the tracking isn't working correctly (or that's at least how I interpret it).

You can redirect the entire domain, you don't need to redirect the entire site. You can use this page on MOZ to read more about the 301 redirect and how to implement it:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

[SeaDrive]

Thanks Anders,

Thank you for the info.

Is this the correct code I  be using should use?

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.seomoz.org [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seomoz.org/$1 [L,R=301]

[JSTRANDELL]

I do not use Apache that much unfortunately (prefer Nginx), but assuming you are using Apache, you'd probably want to add something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^brickmarkers.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.brickmarkers.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[SeaDrive]

Anders,

That worked perfectly, thanks,

Eric

[JSTRANDELL]

Hi Eric,

I'm glad I could help! Feel free to send me a PM if you need further help.