Redirect non-www to www

Search engines consider http://projectamplify.com and http://www.projectamplify.com two different websites. As a result, if your website has been linked to from other websites using both of the two URLs you are effectively splitting the potential benefit of valuable link popularity.

The Solution

You can use a 301 redirect on the "non-www" version of the URL, which is essentially a "permanent" redirect in simple language. You can effectively consolidate all of your link popularity to a single URL. This will help to increase your website's chances of obtaining and maintaining good rankings.

How To Enable The 301 Redirect

You need to instruct the server you are hosting your website on to redirect the traffic seamlessly. To do this you need to first establish what type of server your website is hosted on. There are two main types of servers that are in use: Microsoft and Apache (Linux/Unix). Once you have established the server type you need to follow their related instructions below. Please note this is best left to a person with some technical knowledge.

Non-WWW 301 Redirect on a Apache Server

1. Ensure that your hosting provider has the Apache Rewrite Module turned on its servers; this is a definite requirement for this code to work. In most cases your hosting provider will not have a problem enabling the module if it isn't already enabled.

2. Download the .htaccess file from your website's root web folder to a folder on your machine where you can edit it.

3. Make a copy of the .htaccess file and save it somewhere else for safe keeping in case you need to revert to the old version - do not edit this version.

4. Open the original .htaccess you downloaded in Notepad and add the following code into the .htaccess file. Be sure to substitute "example.com" with your own website information but touch nothing else.

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

Note: (Make sure to escape periods in the RewriteCond line with backslashes. This mostly relates to search-engine friendliness and unity of web stats.)

6. Upload the file back to your website in the exact same place you downloaded it.

7. Once the upload is complete open a browser and try visiting the "non-www" version of your website address. If the .htaccess is working as it should you will be redirected immediately to the full "www" version of your website. This will be reflected in your browser's address bar.

8. If the redirect worked for you, then are done! Congratulations.

If this has not worked, you need to restore the backup you made of the .htaccess file to your website. After the backup is restored go back and review the revised .htaccess info in the file, compare the information to the instructions above and make sure there were no mistakes. If no mistakes are found your server may require some custom programming which is beyond the scope of this doc; please contact your hosting provider for more information.