Redirect Non-WWW To WWW

Your site probably has canonicalisation issues (especially if you have an e-commerce website) and it might start at the domain level.

Simply put, http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/ can be treated by Google as a different URL than http://hobo-web.co.uk/ even though it’s the same page, and it can get even more complicated.

Its thought REAL Pagerank can be diluted if Google gets confused about your URLs and speaking simply you don’t want this PR diluted (in theory).

That’s why many, including myself, redirect non-www to www (or vice versa) if the site is on a Linux/Apache server (in the htaccess file –

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hobo-web.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]

Basically, you are redirecting all the Google juice to one canonical version of a URL.

In 2016 – this is a MUST HAVE best practice.

It keeps it simple when optimising for Google. It should be noted; it’s incredibly important not to mix the two types of www/non-www on site when linking your internal pages!

Note in 2016 Google asks you which domain you prefer to set as your canonical domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

Article published on http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/