Avoid Duplicate Content – URL Redirect and “Preferred Domain” with Google

 Avoid Duplicate Content – URL Redirect and “Preferred Domain” with Google

I recently ran into a problem where one of my sites was being picked up by Google as two different sites … http://mydomain.com and http://www.mydomain.com.

The reason this is a problem is that you don’t want Google to see this as two different sites and penalize you for duplicate content.

So the best way to handle this is to go in to your Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard). If you don’t have this set up yet you really need to get set up with Google Webmaster Tools. Once there, find your website and click on your site. Once you get to the dashboard page for that site you will click on the “Tools” which is on the far left at the bottom. From there you will click on the “Set preferred domain” link. I chose the option for adding the “www” as my preferred domain. 

Then you will need to go into your .htaccess file and make a modification. If you don’t know how to access this file you will need to talk to customer service with your hosing company.

Once you have access to that file you will need to add this code to it:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.php?\ HTTP/ [NC] 

RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php?$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] 

RewriteEngine On 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com [NC] 

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301] 

Of course you will put your own domain name where the “yourdomain.com” is.

Now when you type your domain in without the “www” it should automatically redirect you to the “www” version and this should solve the confusion with Google and they will know the two are actually the same site.

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Tagged as: duplicate content, google, preferred domain, url redirect, webmaster tools