Maximizing your Pagerank with .htaccess
Have you every noticed that yourdomain.com has a different pagerank from www.yourdomain.com?
The problem occurs because some people will link to your website with the www, while others will leave it out.
Use Marketleap’s link popularity tool and put in your domain with and without the www; you’ll see the difference.
You can fix this by creating a file named .htaccess. Add these lines to the file (if it already exists), replacing the yourdomain.com with you actual website’s domain name:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule .* http://www.yourdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
You can also do the reverse so that you lose the www.
I’m not a very technical guy. I don’t know what the full implications this are to your websites search engine rankings (it definately does not hurt you.) At the very least, it will make your site more attractive to other webmasters when selling links or doing link exchanges.
(For the record, I believe there are other factors which are far more important than Pagerank.)
I tried this as I was wanting to do it on a site to consolidate PRs but it didn’t seem to work. Will keep trying and ask around.
Comment by Mike — October 26, 2005 @ 3:07 am
Yep, I’ve been using this since about mid-November of last year when Paul Scrivens of the 9Rules network replied to an email of mine asking him about this. Some people switch it to www., some people switch it to remove it; personally, I believe that the www. is completely redundant and useless and never type my URLs that way, but it’s nice to know that I can ingnorantly force my visitors to follow suit.
Mike, your issue may be that you began using this too late, and you’d already had a PageRank assigned to each seperate URL. I do not have this issue.
Comment by James Henderson — October 30, 2005 @ 6:27 am
We are unable to get our home page to display a pagerank, does anyone have some advice?
Thanks!
Comment by Cheap Magazines — February 8, 2006 @ 2:21 pm
You need incoming links from other sites with pagerank
Comment by Andrew — February 8, 2006 @ 3:12 pm
Great tip Andrew, works well. Thanks. Si
Comment by The Lazy Hippy — May 4, 2007 @ 12:22 pm