Redirecting a domain

[Marvo]

I was setting up a new campaign and received the following error from Roger Robot.

"We have detected that the domain www.sitename.com and the domain sitename.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here."

I know about redirecting a PAGE using 301 Redirects and how to specify the www. canonical in Google webmaster tools, but is there a "DOMAIN" redirect that I'm missing.

What would you suggest doing given the error message above.

Thanks,

Bill

Sqnch.jpg

[RyanKent]

Hi Bill.

Your issue is a common one and yes, there is a solution.

First step is to determine which version of a URL you wish to represent your site, with or without the www. For purposes of this discussion I'll assume you wish to keep the www prefix. In that case, you need to set up a redirect to send all non-www traffic to it's www equivalent.

If you have cPanel access to your web server, you should find a Redirect tool there. Otherwise, you need to modify your htaccess file. If that less sentence is not something you are familiar with, then contact your web host and let them know your wishes. They can easily set this up for you.

For a demo of how it works, type in "google.com" in your web browser. Notice how the address is always changed to http://www.google.com/. That action is because of a properly configured redirect.

[kchandler]

What type of hosting/server do you have linux based or microsoft?

[Marvo]

not sure... this site belongs to a friend.  Can I tell from just looking at the html or do I need to access the server/host?

[kchandler]

You would probably need more information than just looking at the client side. The only way that could work out is if the file extensions were .aspx or .php or something like that.

Essentially what i was getting to, is you would set the redirect differently depending on what type of hosting you are using. If it was microsoft base you would set it in IIS, while if it was linux based you would added it to your root .htacess file.

Hope that helped!

[Highland]

If you're using Firefox, go get the Domain Details addon

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/domain-details/

Then go surf to your site and it should tell you (based on the headers) what kind of server you're running (for instance, seomoz is running Apache 2.2.14)

The most common solution is using htaccess, which can determine at the server level which version to show and 301 all traffic there. Not all web servers support this, though (which is why Kyle asked the question). IIS7+ can support it, as can the most popular open source ones (nginx, lighthttpd, Apache).

Here's an article on how it works

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rewriterule-split-personality-explained

[Marvo]

I'm getting access to the FTP and Host Server.

If they have a cPanel I'll look for that.  May need your help later, once I know more what I'm dealing with.

Thanks so far

[Marvo]

Thanks for the info.

I'll dig in and see what I can find.

[KeriMorgret]

I looked at the server headers for the URL mentioned in the screenshot, and the site is running IIS6. I don't have the instructions for doing the domain redirect for that handy, and it's been ages since I've done it, but at least now we know we can't just say use .htaccess.

[LoveMyPugs]

I thought it would be super cool if someone would post the exact syntax to use in .htaccess to make this happen.  For all the hordes of info out there on redirects and htaccess, it's amazingly hard to find the code for this one.  Here is what worked for me:

<code>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]</code>