We say “even more” because there was a prospect we did a free analysis for. We discovered that when you go to their domain.com site, it was fine, but if someone typed in www.domain.com, the page was literally non-existent. This can really hurt you through the search engines and through customers who ended up on the wrong domain.

To prevent this from happening, you can use a .htaccess file that would tell the browser what to do when they land on either domain.com or www.domain.com.

We prefer to send www.domain.com to domain.com using a .htacess file. If you’re not sure how to make that file, just create a new text file and rename it to “.htaccess”. Make sure you’re also able to edit the extension. If you have trouble with it, you can usually do it through your hosting cpanel via file manager.

If you have a WP blog, these are the codes you’d use in that file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^www.domain.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
</IfModule>

Just replace “domain” with your domain name.

Here’s how you do it if it’s just a regular page (not a blog):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope this helps.