Force www redirect to improve SEO
by Kunal Jain on Feb.13, 2009, under SEO
I have been progressively taking SEO steps for recipemobile and one of the tools that I have used to point out SEO issues is the website grader service. I have managed to consistently improve the score over the past week. Getting indexed on google really helped my score. Another issue that the service was pointing out was that I do not have a 301 redirect from http://recipemobile.com to http://www.recipemobile.com. Although, there are probably quick ways to fix this using the .htaccess file, I was not comfortable mucking around with this.
Luckily, I found a good plugin that might help me get rid of this error.  Its called Redirection. This is a pretty powerful plugin that can moniter and resolve all your wordpress blog redirect problems but here I am just using it to force www for SEO.
Download the plugin here.
Unzip andUpload the redirection directory to your /wp-content/plugins directory.
Activate it from the plugins management page on your wordpress dashboard.
Configure from the Redirection tab under Tools
Click on the Modules Tab and click edit in the wordpress module.
(If the Wordpress module shows inactive because you have not set up permalinks, you should proceed to do so. Here is a good guide of the why and how.)
Under the details section select Force WWW for the canonical dropdown list. For further seo optimization click on Strip index files in the Strip Index dropdown list. Click Save.
Thats it. Test if this works by trying your domain name without the ‘www’ in your browser and it should automatically redirect to www.yourdomainname..
The authors page with full directions and support can be found here http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/
I’m happy to say that this has improved my website grader score and the 301 redirect issue does not show up anymore.
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11 Comments for this entry
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March 2nd, 2009 on 3:25 am
There are some good points in this primer it is quite easy to miss the obvious when doing SEO optimization and loose out on potential customers who are using search terms that would fit your site but are not optimized for it. Google webmaster tools can show you what google bot sees which can be very handy. The builtwith website optimizer can also be a helping hand to people who want to improve their SEO but do not know where to start. The site is available at Top SEO Company
March 9th, 2009 on 7:38 am
great domain name for blog like this)))
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March 10th, 2009 on 2:00 am
now in my rss reader)))
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March 12th, 2009 on 12:25 am
Thanks for following me through RSS!
March 12th, 2009 on 12:26 am
@Penostetothab: Thanks for visiting. Hope you found my blog useful.
March 14th, 2009 on 4:48 am
This might be a little off subject, but have you looked at seoclientprospectingrobot dot com? Just wondering if you have any reviews of it, I’m thinking of buying a copy, and wanted to see if anyone had bought a copy yet.
April 23rd, 2009 on 6:59 am
I have been doing this on all my sites for some time using .htaccess, I find this the best way as it works on any site hosted on an Apache server.
April 23rd, 2009 on 1:10 pm
Jab-au. I agree, using .htaccess would work for most sites if you only want to force a www redirect (or strip www). Redirection is a plugin specific to Wordpress is useful for wordpress users who do not want to try tweaking files themselves. Also, redirection offers several other features that would be hard to implement using just the .htaccess file. Thanks for visiting.
April 28th, 2009 on 6:09 pm
I too miss doing this from time to time. .htaccess is the way to go.
June 13th, 2009 on 11:44 am
Great plugin to improve SEO! Thanks for sharing this
June 14th, 2009 on 1:27 pm
Lyndon, you are welcome. Thanks for visiting.