by Emils on August 17, 2010
I don’t know about you, but I almost never bother to type in www before the web addresses. I just type myimblog.com since I find it easier to type less.
Typing non-www versions of domain names works 99.9 percent of the time, even if the actual domain name has www in it, because most servers are set up to work this way. For this reason most people think that there is really no difference between yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com.
Unlike most people, however, search engines do see the difference between www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com, since technically these could be two separate sites. So what they do is pick one version of your site (either with our without www) and only include that in their listings.
Search engines also count back links to www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com separately. If some of your links go to the www version of the site, but others go to the non-www version, you only get half the value of your back links.
To avoid losing value from your back links, you should always pick one version of your domain, either with or without www, and stick to it. I’ve chosen that I like myimblog.com better, so I’ll only build my back links to this version of website.
However, I cannot really make other people who link to my site always use the non-www version of it. In fact, I already have several back links to www.myimblog.com.
So here is the solution: 301 redirects.
It is possible to redirect every www.yoursite.com page to yoursite.com version (or vice versa) of it by editing your .htaccess file. All your link value will be also redirected if you use 301 redirects.
You can find your .htaccess in the root directory of your website. If it’s there, make sure you back it up before editing. If it’s not there, you will have to create one yourself with Notepad or any similar text editor and upload it to the root directory of your website.
If you only want to use the non-www version of your site, add these lines to your .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^www\.yourdomain\.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,nc]
If you prefer the www version of your site, add these lines:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Save and upload your .htaccess file, and you’re done. To see the end result, you can type www.myimblog.com (or any other page of this blog with www in front of it), and it will be automatically redirected to the non-www version of it.
I hope you find this post useful. If you need any help, feel free to leave a comment below.
by Emils on August 10, 2010
Hi everyone, and welcome to my internet marketing blog!
In this blog I’m going to keep you updated about my progress in the internet marketing world. I genuinely hope that you will enjoy reading my blog since this is my first attempt to blogging.
Even though I’m just a beginner, I also intend to occasionally share some internet marketing tricks and techniques that I’ve found to be useful. In other words, I’ll share with you what I’m learning about online marketing.
Without further ado, let’s start my first progress update.
Apart from this blog, so far I’ve managed to build one niche website. It’s about dog training and dog behavior. This website has been built exactly as Mark Ling teaches to build niche websites in Affiloblueprint.
At the moment my website has 27 unique, keyword-optimized articles, each between 500 and 750 words in length. I’ve got to tell you, that’s a lot of content, especially since I knew nothing about dog training just a couple of months ago. In fact, I’ve never even had a dog. 
My articles are monetized with several dog training and dog food products from Clickbank. I tried to add a banner as well as a couple of relevant (and sometimes huge) affiliate links to each of the articles.
I have also added an opt-in box to some articles, but that is not my newsletter. I got that box from one of the dog training products I promote. If someone buys their product after joining their newsletter from my website, I get the commission. However, I intend to replace that with my own newsletter as soon as I have one.
The topic and title of each article on my website has been chosen after doing keyword research with Traffic Travis software. It has a free version that will do pretty much everything for you, so you might want to check it out.
My dog training websites is not yet ready. I want to add some 5-10 pages and newsletter sign-up boxes before I start actively sending traffic to it. So far the website gets zero traffic and has made me no sales.
My Goals For The Next Week
The next week is going to be special in my life. I’m moving from Latvia to United States to go to a college. I’ve never been to the US and I’ve never lived alone without my family.
Considering that travelling to the US is going to occupy most of my time and that I want to spend my last days in Latvia with friends and family, I won’t be able to get a lot of stuff done.
So my humble tasks for the next week are:
- Writing, publishing and monetizing three new dog training articles
- Writing at least one post in the blog (which is not a progress update)
- Writing the progress update at the end of next week
I hope you enjoyed reading this post. I’ll talk to you soon!
