SEO your URL

If you’re looking for some help on learning mod_rewrite, this post isn’t for you. sorry. Instead, I’m going to show you a neat little trick that will make sure you always have one the www in front of your domain name. Why is it important? Potentially for your stats package, definitely for search engine ranking (no duplicated content), and even for uniformity across brand(?). Though it’s not necessarily part of your “brand” it is important to be consistent with the URLs you send people or have others link to.

For the purposes of this example, we want our URLs to always have the www in front: www.digitalfishlibrary.org

Step 1:
Open (or create) your .htaccess file and add RewriteEngine On if it isn’t already in there.

Step 2:
Below the RewriteEngine On line, add the following Rewrite condition/rule pair:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

We use the http 301 response code to tell browsers and search engines that this is a permanent redirect, thus updating their records. Little-known fact: web browsers are supposed to automatically update bookmarks to the new URL from a 301 code. Search engines probably do the same with their indices.