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google webmaster tools, preferred domain and .htaccess rewrite

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  • #608847
    zigmundovich
    Member

    Hi,

    I read somewhere that it hurts your rankings if your domain can be found with AND without the preceding www in the url. So if:
    htt://mydomain.com and http://www.mydomain.com both point to your homepage then google might consider this as duplicate content and therefore this could hurt rankings.

    To make sure my rankings would remain ok I did the following:
    First, I went to google webmaster tools and I configured my preferred domain as being http://www.mydomain.com

    Second, I included the following code in my .htaccess file to make sure that any request for htt://mydomain.com would be rewritten as http://www.mydomain.com

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

    Recently, my rankings dropped dramatically and now I wonder if this has anything to do with the changes above. Anyone who can advice me on this?

    #767276
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    drop in rankings must have another reason,
    i think you did it exactly right

    #767287
    voodooman
    Member

    I did something similar to my site and Google dropped my home page from their listings. I panicked and un-did everything. Google re-indexed my home page shortly there after.

    I think Google is smart enough to realise that these references lead to one and the same page.

Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)