This is something simple that all blogs can do and all blogs should do, but not all blogs do. Do you know that http://www.gotchance.com and http://gotchance.com are treated by search engines as two different websites. So, the search engine results may split up and even worse the Google PageRank will split too. So, it is generally a good practice to do a Search-Engine-Friendly redirect from on to the other.
Here i have chosen to redirect www.gotchance.com to gotchance.com. But that doesn’t make any difference. Here’s how to do it. Just add the following code to your .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain :
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^www.yourdomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]</code>
If you want to do it otherwise (i.e) from Non-WWW to WWW, here's the code :
<code>Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Now, go ahead and start concentrating your SE Optimization on one domain.
UPDATE : When i checked the FeedBurner stats (while making this post), i noticed something that is very much related to this post. Here is a screenshot. I use gotchance.com/feed for my FeedBurner feed and www.gotchance.com shows as one of the top referrers. This is before i started redirecting www to non-www :
Hello,
I have been quite concerned about this issue as well. May I ask how I can do the re-directing from WWW to the non-WWW address on Blogger? (I am using the new version.)
Thank you very much in advance for your answer!
PJ