Are You Maximising Your Link Juice?

Does your web site work whether you use the www. or not?

Both ought to work but there are a number of considerations that are often missed.

The argument rages over which type of address is the better to use. A domain without the www. is in my mind easier to read:

beckyrose.com versus www.beckyrose.com

But people are used to seeing the www. and when they see it recognise that they are looking at a web page url.

Because my personal site is about geekyness and because "beckyrose.com" is easier to say I call my site beckyrose.com.

An eCommerce site however might be better advised to use the www. version.

Once you have decided on which to use, and you've checked that typing both brings up your web page there is one final thing that you absolutely must do, this is REALLY important.

If you type www.beckyrose.com into my address bar you will notice that when the page loads the www. has been stripped out.

This is because Google sees the two different addresses as entirely different web sites and it's really important that Google understands that they are both the same, i'll explain why.

Firstly if people are posting links to your web site all those links add up and give you page rank. (At the time of writing this web site has a Google Page Rank of 4 - that is pretty good for a personal web site.).

Pank Rank is a measure of how much authority your site has, Google's theory is that the more people who link to you the better quality your content is, sites with a high page rank are therefor more likely to appear higher in search (there are other factors such as rellevence, location etc).

If people link to both the www. and non www. version of your web site then you will be spreading these valuable inbound links between two identical sites.

Worse yet is that Google will recognise that the content of one of the sites is the same and will remove it from it's index. This is an issue relating to "duplicate content" which is a subject for another day, but for now what you need to understand is that Google will throw away one of your sites - resulting in those inbound links counting for absolutely nothing at all.

There are a number of ways you can solve this problem, but the goal is to do what is called a "301 Redirect". Using a 301 Redirect anyone who tried to go to the wrong URL will be sent to the correct one and Google will learn the correct location of the content if the wrong URL is ever published anywhere.

I achieve this using an .htaccess rule, my code is shown below.

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

Recent Articles

Ask Becky a Question