How do I add a 301 redirect to my Apache httpd.conf?

This is a bad thing, as your friend suggests. The reason? Every URL is considered as a different page on your site according to the search engines, so while you might deserve, say, a combined PageRank on Google of five, it might be that "hostname.com" is a PR3 and "www.hostname.com" is a PR4 when you check.

You can quickly ascertain whether your site has this problem too, by simply entering in both versions of the domain name to your Web browser and checking to see if they stay as you typed them in (bad) or one of them is magically rewritten to be in the other form so that there's a single, consistent URL for both (good).

If you need to tweak this, as I had to on this site recently, you can most easily do so by going into your httpd.conf file and adding the following three lines:

In this instance, I want the form "www.askdavetaylor.com" as the default consolidated domain name format. You can test it: click on this link and watch what URL you actually have in your Web browser by the time you get the home page: http://askdavetaylor.com/.

Depending on your Apache configuration, you might need a more sophisticated version of this too:

The difference between the two is that the latter only works if this is the only domain that is assigned the specified IP address, while the former works if you have multiple domains with the same IP address, as I do on my own server.

Also note that while the Apache Rewrite Engine is darn cool and very powerful (I use it for lots of tricks on this site) it's also slow, so engaging it when you don't really need to use it can slow down your Web server. Not a good thing.

Finally, it's important that you use a 301 permanent redirect rather than 302 temporary redirects so as not to get into trouble with Google and other search engines. Google's Matt Cutts has a worthwhile article on this subject if you want to know why this is so: The little 301 that could.

If you want to know more about redirects and error pages, by the way, you might well find the site custom 404 error page amusing and useful.

Thanks to Steve Loyola of Best Book Buys.com and Alek Komarnitsky, who is busy trying to raise money for charity through the weird and wacky V7ndotcom elursrebmem competition, for their assistance with this important server note.