Don’t Allow This Stupid Mistake To Lose Your Page Rank

May 22, 2008

Yesterday I discovered how your website can play “ugly” game with you, along with search engines. These all addresses search engines are seeing like a different URLs, no matter they open the same page:

http://example.com
http://example.com/
http://example.com/index.html
http://www. example.com
http://www. example.com/
http://www. example.com/index.htm

If you or other people are linking to your Internet site using a diversity from these similar URL’s, you’ll not only be thinning PR(Page-Rank) on your site, but in addition to that you’ll suffer the risk of having your content marked as duplicate. Once Google sees all the multiple versions of your domain name their spiders examines which page to rank, and all the rest directs into the supplemental index.

Typing this in Google:

site: www.web2whizzing.com*** -view

I discovered that this URL (web2whizzing.com/) is considered as duplicate.

Every page listed in this search, Google has placed in supplemental index. And that means they can barely bring search engine traffic. They just pick randomly which links to place in supplement order. This means that all above links are actually sharing page rank for the one page.

To check it for your website, just replace yours instead of my domain name.

The solution:

…is to redirect all these links to one. Now my http://web2whizzing.com/ redirects to http://www.web2whizzing.com/.

If this is new for you, here is how to do that:
Watch Jason’s Katzenback youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76CltyxnFVw.
It is great explanation, only the code (which you have to put to execute operation) is not clearly seen.

Here is the code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^80$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.example.com:%{SERVER_PORT}/$1 [L,R]

And this is the source where I found the code:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

(There are more tips there, but if you are not interested in all programming – coding stuff, don’t waste your time, just grab this code).

Google Webmasters Tools

It is probably whole month I am telling myself i will go to Google webmasters tools dashboard to check all this things.

… ok, I went today and it is excellent additional adjustment to this problem. Here is what to do:

Go to the Google Webmasters page, and verify your website,

Pick /Site configuration /Settings/ option from menu,

And choose “set preferred domain”.

This is the process to pick up the preferred URL, and that way Google will only index the page you select.

Also, you can play with other tools there.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Google

Comments

2 Responses to “Don’t Allow This Stupid Mistake To Lose Your Page Rank”

Pradeep on June 13th, 2008 10:01 am

thanx for the tutorial Sloba. unfortunately i cant use this tutorial on my blogger.com blog (they dont allow u to upload any file but your blog template)
but i will keep this in my mind for my son to be launched WordPress blog
PS: Apart from “preferred domain” Google webmaster tool lets you generate robots.txt if your blog software doesn’t generate it automatically
and other options like enhance image search and ability to adjust the speed of how often google spider should crawl your blog is just great
Sloba on June 14th, 2008 6:09 pm

Hi Pradeep,
thats the reason I prefer WordPress as a platform.
And you are right, at Google webmaster tool there are other useful tools, what I have stated at the last sentence of the post.
I have separate article on how to optimize images for Search Engines – Optimize Your Images Like a SEO Professional