Matt Cutts of Google gets a lot of questions on this subject: How can I improve my Google PageRank?

Many webmasters think they know the answer to this question.  It’s no secret that many SEO techniques are pure speculation, but here is some good advice from Matt Cutts himself: rewrite your .htaccess file so that it redirects traffic to the best URL of your choice.  Google calls it “canonicalization” and here’s what it means:

We’ll use our URL as an example - if an end user of our site types http://firelead.com, we have determined that the best URL is actually http://www.firelead.com, so typing http://firelead.com will actually redirect the end user to http://www.firelead.com.

It is recommended that you do the same to your site to help out your SEO.  Here is an example of what we edited in our .htaccess file:

<—BEGIN CODE—>

RewriteEngine on

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

<—END CODE—>

Basically this code will redirect any user that types http://firelead.com to http://www.firelead.com.  We have also told Google in Webmaster Tools that our prefered URL is http://www.firelead.com.

If you do not know where to find your .htaccess file check in the root directory of your webserver hosting your site.  You should be able to copy it to your computer and edit it with a text editor, then upload it back to your webserver.

Posted on February 21st, 2007 by Firelead Affiliate Network
Filed under: Google, Google PageRank, SEO, Webmasters