Michael Gareth Morgan

At last, the big G finally rolled out a PageRank update. I can’t even remember the last time I saw an update happen so I was happy to see this one. All of my new sites (since the update) have been given some PR juice, all pretty low though – highest is PR3, some at PR2 and most at PR1. Some of my older sites lost their PR; they were only at PR1 though so that’s no problem really.

I just hope these PageRank updates become a bit more frequent. It’s nice to have some sort of realizable ladder to climb when doing SEO.

You may or may not know that when accessing a web site you usually have the choice of typing in http://www.domain.com or just http://domain.com -the difference is of course whether or not you include the www. Both of these will normally bring you to the exact same web site with no cosmetic differences what so ever.

The truth is that although including or excluding the www in a url makes absolutely no difference to the end user it can have a huge impact when it comes to search engines. For example, Google and Yahoo will treat both the http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com addresses as two completely different sites. So what does this mean? Well it means several things one of which is duplicate content. The search engines will see that both sites (although its the same site) have the same content and will therefore most likely exclude one from the search engines. With regards to Google PageRank your site will also be trated as two different sites each one having its own pagerank values assigned to it.

The fix is easy! Firstly decide whether you want to use the www version or the non-www version. To be honest it doesn’t really matter which one you use as long as you use just one of them. Then, you can either use some sort of 301 redirection or add one of these snippets of code into your .htaccess file.

Removing the www

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

Forcing the www

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

Of course in the examples above make sure you replace “domain.com” with whatever your actual domain is.

My collection of sites is constantly growing – I seem to be launching at least one new site every month. Because of this and the work involved with getting these sites into the search engines I’ve decided to create a simple link exchange management script which I will use to manage any link exchange requests which anyone makes with any of my sites.

So, if you’re interested in exchanging links with any of my sites simply head on over to my link exchange manager where you can choose the site, pick the link placement and send me your link details.

I’ll do my best to accept/reject any exchange requests as soon as possible!

For my latest project I’m happy to say that I am currently at number 2 in Google for the search Photoshop shapes which is great.

I’ve seen a pretty good increase in traffic since I’ve moved up to this position which is nice. Still a lot of work to do though – Number 1 here I come!