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How do I map XX.com to www.XX.com in Apache?

I've been keeping an eye on a very interesting discussion about the difference between the Google pagerank of pages on a "www" domain name and the same page without the "www" prefix (e.g. "www.intuitive.com/index.html" versus "intuitive.com/index.html"). Google calculates pagerank based on quite a few different criteria - as detailed in my article How does Google figure out what pages are more relevant? Pagerank. - and if you care about that, and you should, you should be automatically mapping all non-www URLs to their www equivalent.

And here's how to do just that...


Dave's Answer:

In your httpd.conf file, look for an entry like this:

<VirtualHost bestbookbuys.com>
ServerAlias www.bestbookbuys.com
That's the problem in a nutshell: you are defining the "real" name of the Web site to be the domain name without the www prefix. To fix it, change the above entry to something more like:
<VirtualHost www.bestbookbuys.com>
without any ServerAlias entry at all.

Failing that, if you have an entry in your httpd.conf that's more like this:

<VirtualHost www.auctionincome.com>
ServerAlias auctionincome.com
just remove the ServerAlias line.

Either way, you'll also want to, later in the httpd.conf file, add this:

<VirtualHost auctionincome.com>
Redirect permanent /    http://www.auctionincome.com/
</VirtualHost>
This is explained in some detail in the Apache documentation too, if you want more detail.

One cool additional feature: a Redirect of this nature copies everything after the first slash, so a URL like auctionincome.com/abc/def.html will redirect to www.auctionincome.com/abc/def.html, which is exactly what you want.

My thanks to Steve Loyola of Best Book Buys and Chuck Eglinton of Auction Income for their input

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Reader Comments To Date: 7

Sean said, on November 10, 2004 2:35 PM:

mod_rewrite also does a good job, and avoids the extra vhosts. Here's what I use to map www.site -> site (this is for ccsacertification.com, substitute as appropriate)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^ccsacertification\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://ccsacertification.com/$1 [L,R]

Sean

Phil said, on November 10, 2004 4:39 PM:

Why would I want to use www.site.com instead of just site.com? You implied in your opening that this was somehow Googlebot-friendly, but I can't find anything about that in the post you referenced. Can you clarify or point to some more complete info?

Dave Taylor said, on November 10, 2004 5:27 PM:

The main idea is that Google indexes *pages* not *sites*, so as far as it's concerned, www.phord.com/page3.html is completely different from phord.com/page3.html. By splitting your links between the two, you don't gain the combined value of all the incoming links on the one page and you end up with a lower search engine ranking that you want.

Make sense?

Dave Taylor said, on November 10, 2004 5:29 PM:

What I should say, as a followup, is that it doesn't really matter whether you use the "www." or not, what matters is that you're consistent. If you prefer the non-www version of your domain, just make sure that all inbound links (like comments on Weblogs!) also use that form too.

Stewart Vardaman said, on November 23, 2004 3:54 AM:

Phil, I'll add it's worth doing for more reasons than just Google. I've noticed for some time now that the Daypop Top 40 robot makes a distinction between www and no-www.

http://www.vardaman.org/archive/2003/11/26

See the rankings for adbusters.org in the graphic? Their ranking is fragmented at #16 and #19, where combined properly they should rank a good deal higher.

JD Hodges covers this as well:

http://www.jdhodges.com/log/1373

If you read through the comments you'll notice I got a big difference comparing the reason.com site.

3omar said, on May 17, 2009 3:21 AM:

das

ephr said, on September 15, 2009 4:54 AM:

aw

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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