Have you ever gone to a website where all of these combination work:

www.youwebsitename.com, websitename.com, and websitename.com/index.html?

Unfortunately, Google views this as duplicate content and frowns upon it.  Many of us who run websites are always looking for ways to optimize our websites and truly want to avoid any Google penalties.

Rule of Thumb: When you’re linking to anything in your website always use the same link, whether its www.YourDomain.com, YourDomain.com, or YourDomain.com/index.html .  This is key to showing google you really only have one link.

One Simple Change: Another nifty and very simple way of avoiding duplicate content is redirecting all non-www traffic to www via a 301 redirect.  To do this, go to your highest folder, likely in the www folder add this text to your .htaccess file.

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

Kerry Fitzgerald
Kerry is a blogger on a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com