Force www in your domain name

I recently learned that for many purposes, especially SEO it is important that your domain name redirect to either its www or non-www version but not both.

If you are able to access a site via www.paralleldesigns.net and paralleldesigns.net then the search engines consider this two different pages that hold the same content. This is consider text/content spamming. This kind of practice will get you penalize, therefore yielding a lower search engine ranking.

To do a quick test on your site, install the google toolbar and visit your site. You should see a different page rank depending on how you visit the site. In my case, when I was visiting www.paralleldesigns.net/blog I would see a PR of 4, but when I visited blog.paralleldesigns.net I notice a PR of 0.

Because we all work for Google, I wanted to make sure I complied with this and all other search engines.

The bottom line is that with so many rules that apply to the search engines, it is hard to always do the right thing, especially if you don't know what is the right thing.

If you want to follow this rule, then create an .htaccess file and enter the following code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.paralleldesigns.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.paralleldesigns.net/$1 [R=301,L]

of course, you would want to change my domain name for yours.