Why oh why oh why do websites waste potential traffic? We’ve seen so many sites that either not understand, or plainly disregard either the www. or non-www. records of their websites.

The example that has just sprung to mind is the Trafford Centre in Manchester. The www. record works but the non-www. record does not. Why? I for one when typing an address in the browser, hardly ever use www. as it’s frankly an extra 4 characters I don’t want to type again and again.

Take 3dpixel.net for example, we have www. set up as a CNAME (DNS name to name alias) of the main A record so that they both point to the same website.

Duplicate content penalty from google? No problem! Use mod_rewrite to force it to the prefix of choice. Whichever one you want it does not matter as long as it’s ONE of them only.

In .haccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.3dpixel\.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://3dpixel.net/$1 [R=301,L]

So instead of presenting your potential visitors with a nasty 404 error. Why not get those visitors to your site. 100% free!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 9:13 am and is filed under Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.