Maybe the rebel in you says “Who cares what Google has on me?” Maybe you really don’t care, but if that’s the case, let us consider reasons why you really should care. Maybe you just gave up trying to have a “clean” representation on Google. Too many people view it as a futile effort and throw in the towel, give up, and just live with it.
It may shock you how many websites collect information about you, and what they are presenting to anybody looking. What Google is telling people about you matters more than ever before. Just one ugly social media rant on a bad day – or worse, one politically incorrect slip on your part may cost you, big. Add in some faulty information or somebody with the same or similar name, and it can be a big problem – but avoidable.
It recently struck me, as I decided to re-publish this old blog after taking it down five years ago. I want my own words to be there when they Google Mark Murnahan.
Even if you don’t care, somebody probably does care what the Internet says about you. It isn’t just about looking good among friends. It can cost you a future job – or even a current job. It could keep you (or your kid) from getting that college acceptance letter (true story). It could mean you don’t get a second date. It could even hurt somebody near you. As a father, you can bet I’m Googling the kids that my kids hang out with, along with their parents.
The reasons to be aware and manage what’s out there are numerous. An estimated seventy-five percent of companies will Google your name to make hiring decisions. I suspect that’s a low estimate. What if you are not looking for a job? Maybe the threat doesn’t feel as grave, but bosses eventually retire, quit, or move on. What if the new boss wants to know you a little better?
What will they find?
What about a date? It may seem all magical at first, but when they stop responding to your messages, it may be time to see what they found online, and freshen it up a bit.
There are many reasons to consider what’s out there in the wild, with your name on it. Information doesn’t even have to be true to cause damage. It’s really worth the minutes it takes to find out, and begin to address it.
Being proactive and building positive information in search results is the best answer. That makes it much harder for the ugly stuff to build up later. If it’s already a bit messy, it is time to give Google something positive to show people.
I want to share a tool I found useful, and unlike others I have seen. Note that this is unsolicited. I am not paid to write this. If I seem excited about it, that’s because I found it to be a very useful and informative site. I am highly impressed.
BrandYourself offers a free tool to help you discover things that may be holding you back or harming your good name, online. It will find things you may not realize are out there in the wild, including a thorough look at search and social media sites. The results may surprise you.
A free BrandYourself profile will give you another page that will climb the search rankings and help knock down another of the things you don’t want in the top listings. It will also help the good information that you list on your profile, such as your LinkedIn, Twitter, your blog, or other pages, to rank better and hold their position. This makes it a great tool, both proactively and reactively, to improve your online reputation.
The tools of BrandYourself are robust, well-researched, and include useful tips to help you do it yourself. You can also set up notifications to keep an eye on your progress. They have service upgrades available, and even a Concierge Service in case you need their professional help.
Rather than explain it all to you, here’s their “Shark Tank” pitch from 2015. Notice that they turned down millions of dollars from the Sharks, but went on to do far better elsewhere. Since that time, they have grown the tools on an impressive scale. The social media tools are very robust, and the search value is excellent.
Here is an example of a BrandYourself profile: Mark Murnahan
Google acquires many companies, but do you ever notice which ones, and do you ever speculate on why Google wants these start-up companies? I think it makes for some great water cooler gossip, but I also think it begins to form a picture of where our Internet is, and where it is moving.
Some of the recent Google acquisitions have been Fridge, which has a focus on security in social sharing, and PittPatt (Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition), a facial recognition developer. With only minimal creativity, one can imagine how these could each be useful to Google. I am confident that we will see influence from these technologies as Google continues to enhance the Google+ platform and other Google products.
I think perhaps one of the most telling of Google’s recent acquisitions is when they picked up PostRank in June. I wrote about PostRank back in 2010 in an article titled “Social Media Measurement Tools: What Do They Know About You?” Something I stated in that article was as follows: “PostRank pulls data from many sources, which makes it far less fallible than others which only measure single points of data.” It seems that Google noticed the value in this as well.
The image below shows an example of a PostRank score for a given article and indicates what PostRank knows about it. PostRank data can still be flawed, due to network restrictions and the sheer volume of data, but it does a good job.
Example of PostRank Measurement
We obviously know that Google has been very keen on social media for a long time. In fact, I have often said that Google is the ultimate king of social media. I do not mean because of their efforts with relative non-starters like Google Wave and Google Buzz, or the social feed in Google search results.
When I say that Google is the king of social media, I mean that because they have always made extraordinary strides toward measuring and delivering the information that is deemed important by social interaction. That social interaction has historically been in the form of websites linking to other websites. Google not only measures links from website to website, but they qualify it with the more popular websites providing amplification to the signal. This principle is not changing, but the methods and complexities of measurement are changing. In my estimation, Google is not missing a beat, and the acquisition of PostRank further adds to their reach.
People have tried to argue that Google’s measurement of links from one website to another is not social media, but let’s have a look at “social”. Social means, literally, “Of or relating to society or its organization” and it doesn’t just mean the microcosmic view of making buddies or socializing in the “let’s grab a beer” sense. By measuring website links, Google has used a social response from others to determine what people want, and what they are looking for.
So, let’s look at how the modern use of social media changed things. Google’s historical measurement of links is still just as social-based as what we see in modern social networks. The overall factors of separating the popular from the unpopular are similar. The difference today is that the simplicity of sharing those links is much easier for the non-technical “John and Mary Lunchbucket” type who don’t know anything about websites or HTML. Accordingly, it is much faster, and the amount of information to sort through is huge. There are a lot of factors to assimilate, and far more data points than ever before. Google is extremely efficient at this, but now Google has even more help gathering that data.
Since you may wonder how Google’s acquisition of PostRank really makes sense, or how it can help Google, here is a brief statement about PostRank in their own words:
What is PostRank?
The social web connects people where they share, critique and interact with content and each other. PostRank is the largest aggregator of social engagement data in the industry.
Our platform tracks where and how users engage, and what they pay attention to — in real-time. PostRank social engagement data measures actual user activity, the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a site, story, or author.
PostRank provides useful data for publishers, and now that data will be useful to Google as well. I have heard a lot of people confused about how Google views the usage of modern social networks. I think it is absurd that a person could actually think they are not making efficient use of this information. For anybody who doubts the degree to which Google gives attention to modern social signals, the acquisition of PostRank should give a further indication that they are serious.
PostRank Engagement Activity Report
What Google Says About PostRank
According to an article on TechCrunch, Google made the statement about their acquisition of PostRank as follows:
“We’re always looking for new ways to measure and analyze data, and as social analytics become increasingly important for online businesses, we’re excited to work with the PostRank team to make this data more actionable and accountable. They have developed an innovative approach to measuring web engagement, and we think they can help us improve our products for our users and advertisers.”
If you are curious about how it works, or what PostRank knows about your presence on the web, I would encourage you to take a closer look and get familiar with PostRank.
This further emphasizes what I have always claimed, which is that SEO and social media marketing are entirely intertwined, and always will be. Through it all, I think it is important to note that Google wants to index your website, and they even go to great lengths to help you help yourself.
I have an uncommon analogy for you to consider today. I sometimes feel a bit like a mad scientist slinking into my secret laboratory, just a little bit like Dr. Frankenstein. It seems especially real on days when I sit at this computer for sixteen hours, nap for three hours, and then return with my crazy mad scientist hairdo and coffee breath. Creepy? Perhaps, but it is always fun to exclaim “It’s Alive!” after it all comes together just right.
I realize that some people are squeamish about biology, but don’t worry, we are just imagining this for a few minutes. Think of it like a science fiction movie scene.
Try to picture the Internet as a sci-fi creature with living tissue, nerves, and blood vessels growing every day. It is alive and growing, and it has defense mechanisms just like most organic life forms. If you introduce a foreign object, it will either accept it, or it will reject it.
Now try to picture a surgical introduction of an organ transplant of a man-made synthetic tissue. Your website, along with the rest of your online branding assets, make up that donor organ. In the beginning, it is laid on the surface of the huge Internet organism, and surgically connected by way of new social networking efforts and a micro-web of hyperlinks to and from other websites. This is the toughest time for the transplant, and requires a lot of nurturing.
The donor organ is nourished with the textual content of the website, but it cannot live on its own for very long. It will need to connect with and become a part of the larger organism. The surgical team (web developers, SEO, owners, management, and etcetera) will need to work diligently if the donor organ is to be accepted to live and grow as a healthy addition to that larger organism.
Like any organ transplant, if the organ is not well-matched, it will not grow, and it will be rejected. To improve its odds of acceptance, the website medical staff needs to introduce antibodies to the larger Internet organism, and connect the nerves (the people) carefully. Think of the antibodies as the useful things the website has to offer, and the nerves as the people. The delivery method is social media and appropriate business networking with existing parts of the larger organism. You know, instead of hypodermic needles and pills.
The useful “antibodies” help to keep the nerves (the people), and other defenses of the large creature soothed, and even bring it to embrace the new donor organ (website). It is critically important that the surgical team connects the right nerves in the right places in order to make it a healthy transplant.
Why the Organ Transplant Analogy?
This concept came to mind as a prospective client asked me to help her launch a new surgical center website and social media campaign. She did not seem to grasp all that really goes into developing a successful online presence, just as I don’t fully understand how to perform surgery. She mostly just wanted to believe that a good website with a little search engine optimization fairy dust and social media chattiness was all it took. That is kind of like if I assumed surgery just takes some sharp knives and clean towels.
Things such as targeted marketing using customer modeling based on demographics, psychographics, and propensity analysis held no importance to her. She didn’t understand or want to accept those concepts in the beginning, just as I don’t understand why they can’t easily replace my blackened smoky lungs with a new pair.
While visiting with her, I decided that I needed an analogy, so I used the example of the online marketing work I do for myself. That is easy, because I never have to worry about treading on a client’s non-disclosure agreement (and most of my clients require them). It also shows that I have faith in what I was telling her … after all, I performed the same surgery on myself.
So, I explained that there are over 157,000 links pointing to my blog articles, according to Google Webmaster Tools, and that indicates a healthy transplant. Google Webmaster Tools Links Screenshot
They each add up to connect my blog to the rest of the Internet organism. They are like the nerves and the blood vessels that have adopted my blog as a part of the larger organ which is the Internet. Now my blog helps to nourish the larger organ, and the Internet nourishes my blog as an accepted donor organ.
Then she was concerned about how much it would cost to do it the right way, but without any apparent concern about the cost of doing it the wrong way. Of course, everybody wants to know the cost, but as I’ve explained before, simply asking “How Much Does SEO Cost?” is the wrong question … for many reasons.
The cost of good marketing is kind of like paying taxes. If somebody asks me about taxes, I will tell them I’d prefer to pay a billion per year in taxes, because that means I earned a lot more than that! Similarly, if you spend a lot of money on marketing … the right marketing … it pays you many times whatever you pay for it.
She eventually steered away from her cost concerns, and she began to recognize that she was doing this to increase profit … and not to waste profit. Then she was concerned about how long it would take. Of course, we all want things fast … especially when it comes to money. The more important and seemingly obvious consideration is not only in how long it takes, but whether you implement the skill, the time, and the effort to make it possible at all. If you are doing it well, the time frame is shortened accordingly.
The conversation was very familiar. She was terrified of making good business decisions. I don’t blame her for that. It is a challenging process, and the world of online marketing has tried to overlook good business principles of “pay now, play later“.
Do Surgeons Have All the Answers?
I told her that I could create the tissue in my lab, surgically implant the tissue into the Internet body, help her with the antibodies, and nourish its growth. Then, in her wisdom, she decided that she just wanted me to create the tissue, but that she would handle the surgery and the after-surgery care.
This was because she thought it would save her some money. Yes, the surgeon decided to be a marketer … or to assign it to somebody she could pay the least possible amount of money to. The truth that she does not want to face is that she would be wiser to create a novice website but hire a great surgeon. The even more astonishing truth is that she would be a lot better to count on professionals to carry out the surgery from beginning to end, just the way her patients do.
Can you believe that even somebody so intelligent as a skilled surgeon does not understand the much higher value in allowing the professionals to do the work they are trained to do? Seriously, when people are so absurd to believe that they should add another profession to their resume to save a few bucks, just imagine the dollars they leave behind with their even more expensive and time consuming trial and error learning.
In summary: The next time you, or a loved one goes into surgery, be sure to ask the doctor if she does her own marketing. If so, she is probably not the smartest surgeon.
You may wonder how I will make this turn out to be both useful and humorous, but have a little faith, my Google searching friend. This is a list of my answers to some the dumbest Google searches I recently found in my server logs. Before I cut straight to my list of absurdities, allow me just a moment to set the stage.
I love SEO. There, I said it! I really do love my work, although it is usually much more fun to do it than to explain it to people. I am the first to suspect that, as I have often said, “When I Go to Hell, They Will Have Me Selling SEO“. Yes, fun to do it, but tortuous to explain it.
One of the reasons I love SEO so much is the great humor and insights to the human mind that it offers. This is also one of the reasons you may sometimes find me to be condescending and uppity, because there are truly some dumb people out there. Yes, saying that makes me a jerk, but actually more of a “PECKER” (Reference: “New SEO Acronym to Replace SEO by 2012“).
It takes all types to make a species, but wow … just “Wow!” I am a fan of people, but sometimes I have to feel just a little tinge of embarrassment for the floaters in our genetic pool.
The term “SEO”, for the uninitiated, is an acronym for “search engine optimization”, and as a practitioner in the field, it means that I can generally rank at the top of the list for damn near anything I choose. That is why companies pay me to provide this service for them. Yeah, can you believe it? Being ranked at the top of search results is actually worth paying for. That is totally crazy, I know!
Don’t hate me for it, because it comes with a touch of insanity, and a good dose of time. Like well over a decade of practice and studying SEO to know what works.
A good amount of this particular achievement comes down to having a squillion website links pointing to my blog from other websites, and having just a touch of Murnahan wit and charm. OK, you can call it “BS”, or whatever you like, but let’s face it, some websites will rank well in search engines, and some will never be indexed for popular searches. This one ranks particularly well, which comes with a great potential for humor.
I previously wrote about the downside of being obsessed with statistics and over-monitoring of user data, but it is also very important to know how people are finding a website. It tells us what we need to know, and how to make things even better. When you dig really deep, it can sometimes make hot coffee shoot uncontrollably from your nose as you laugh. This is especially the case when you try to picture what in the world those people were actually hoping to find in their online search.
NOTE: Although I am a huge proponent of targeting a market based on specific propensity of readers to become a customer or to refer business. Targeting is why I write things to attract specific searches from specific people. For example, I wrote about NASCAR start and park teams to reach the racing community, while offering good marketing thoughts.
With the good comes the bad, and sometimes it all goes wonky. If you rank well for the useful search terms, always it comes with unexpected absurdities. Although some of these may not seem so humorous on the surface, if you squint and look closely, there is something just a bit funny going on here.
Each of these searches have come in many variations of the search, and each is an actual verbatim quote taken from the top 5,000 searches in my website analytics within the past 30 days (typographical errors and all).
OK, I hate to drop this little peach so early, but this one does set a certain tone. This is an actual search that has been repeated in many various forms, including some that were probably typed urgently like “what;s good for hemorrhoids” (Twitter, of course!). It leads users to an article that asks “Is Twitter Good for SEO?“. The article may actually be useful, but I didn’t write this one for bums. If your butt hurts, I really don’t have a lot for you, but dozens of people seem to think that ice cream may help.
I can forgive this fella for misspelling testicles, and for not realizing that “themselves” is actually just one word. This came from a Korean speaking individual in Burke, Virginia, USA. What I picture is a really frustrated little Korean guy sitting cross-legged at his computer screaming at his lover and murmuring “You betteh be right woman, oh I keow you!”
I actually took a screen capture of this one when it happened. My guess is that he did not want to call 9-1-1, just in case he actually ended up killing somebody. I hope that poor guy is alright! I also hope he does not come for my testicles for wasting his precious moment with my article titled “SEO, Social Media, and Marketing Balls“. In my defense, I did not use the word “testicles” in the article, even once, and there was no medical advice.
I suppose I kind of asked for this one when I titled an article “Hookers Write the Best Blogs“. What I didn’t realize at the time was just how many people would be performing Google image searches for pictures of hookers. I searched it one time, just to see what they were seeing. A few transsexual hookers and other creepy images later, I washed my eyes out with Listerine and vowed to never do that again!
Who knew that termites were so in-demand? I see a lot of variations for the query of where to buy termites. Although I am sure a number of these are people seeking to study termites in their laboratory, it makes me wonder how many angry ex-husbands are dumping these voracious little monsters around the foundations of their former homes. For those looking for termites, I offer this article titled “Things You Cannot Sell Online“. Termites are not one of those things, and it is highly unlikely that what you sell is on the list, too!
I wonder what they want with a blog troll. Yeah, I am sure that some people are just looking for a picture of a blog troll, but nobody I know has actually ever seen one. They sneak around in the shadows of the Internet. Here is what I had to say about them: A Few Words About Blog Trolls and Lurkers.
This one is really dumb for a couple reasons. Sutures are those things they use to stitch people up after surgery. They generally come at an extremely high cost to we consumers. I guess maybe there is not enough markup in the medical field, so they have to find their sutures cheap so they can earn an extra four dollars on a $40,000 surgery.
The other reason this one cracks me up is that I was once contracted to place a client at the top of searches for cheap sutures. They still owe me many tens of thousands of dollars, but then, that is why I now hold five of the top ten search results for their company name, “Suture Express“, along with their coveted “cheap sutures” and the names of each of their executives. Oops! 😉
This one should be simple. What else could a person logically expect would happen? Your computer will be infected with a virus that causes it to explode into a squillion pieces. I would not suggest this, especially with a laptop, but if it happens to you, just Google me when you need those testicles reconnected.
In case you need to know more about Facebook or their computer-exploding virus, here is more information on the topic.
This one is actually a very popular search, and it blows my mind. I mean, seriously, just look at the source code on any one of my blog’s pages if you need a mental re-adjustment on the topic of SEO tips. I would like to give you a quote from the article these search patrons find:
“As long as there are people who ask “do meta tags help with SEO” there will be plenty of people to con them out of their money.”
I hope you are not searching for information about meta tags. If so, you really should stick around and read some more.
My answer would perhaps be to quit the job and seek something better. Please just don’t make it a writing career until you at least learn the difference between your and you’re. Sure, maybe this is no big deal, but if “your too good at your job”, you’re probably going to need a better resume writer.
Another idea for being too good at your job is to give it all up and become an SEO and social media expert. That seems to be mighty damn popular (in searches, too)!
My first thought here is “huh?” I am not so sure why, but a lot of searches just don’t make any sense to me at all. Apparently a limited few people are trying to find things people find. What they actually find is an article titled “Crazy Things People Search For” which addresses the ways people use search engines. It kind of goes well with this piece, so you may enjoy it.
This one actually comes with a whole lot of related searches that are equally as ridiculous. Some of those are social media rates, seo hourly rate, how much does it cost for SEO, social media marketing cost, how much will a social media strategy cost, and literally thousands more.
What these searchers are obviously completely terrified and confused about is that there is a vast difference from one SEO to another. Asking the cost without knowing what to expect or understanding that it is not about cost, but rather increased profit, is about as wasteful and dumb as any question ever asked.
Have you seen the Grand Canyon? I would like to submit that the difference in good SEO and bad SEO makes that thing look like a crack in a sidewalk.
My Dumb Summary of Dumb Google Searches
I guess eleven is enough for now. I gave you a whole lot of truly useful links dispersed throughout this article. In fact, probably enough that if you sit there and read them all at once, it will make your bum hurt. So, please bookmark this page, get yourself some ice cream to sit in, come back, and take some time checking them out.
Also, please add your comments and tell me how you arrived here. If you are that poor Korean fella represented in this image, I’d love to know how things turned out.
If you are not that Korean guy, be sure you subscribe, because I’ve got a whole lot more where this came from!
Geeky SEO Made Easy
This is an extremely important and yet simple to implement SEO tip about those “w’s” you often see in a web address. This will seem basic to many people, but it is shocking how often it is misunderstood, handled incorrectly, or overlooked. If you do not have this handled correctly this could make a huge improvement in your SEO efforts.
This is not just about whether somebody can arrive at your website by typing either domain.com or www.domain.com. This is about how Google and other search engines may see it as duplicate content, because it is actually the same thing in two locations. It is also about how all of the links pointing to these duplicate versions of your website are treated, and their value split in two – thus diluted. It will not cause a penalty imposed by the search engines, but there is still a real penalty to it, all the same.
Either version of www or non-www is fine, but it is important to choose one version and funnel your efforts toward the chosen version. If your website has more high quality existing links pointing to one version, that is the right one to use! If you don’t know, be sure to check both versions with a tool like Open Site Explorer.
Don’t Let the Big “Canonicalization” Word Scare You
Relax! I will make this easy for you. The abbreviated Murnahan version is this: Canonicalization means there is just one outcome for multiple possible actions. In this case, it means telling search engines to favor the outcome of your choosing (“www.” or no “www.”).
That big and scary word, “canonicalization“, reminds me that everybody is not familiar with technical SEO (search engine optimization) issues. There are even fewer people who understand and enjoy things like web server architecture, DNS, htaccess, 301 response codes, and other geeky delights which make me excited to wake up in the morning. Yes, I truly enjoy the geeky details of how this Internet works. I hope to make this easy enough that you will enjoy it, too! Well, I will at least make it easy, and I’m even going to provide a simple tool so you can check what your website is saying to the search engines.
WWW. is a Different Domain
When you go to a website, you will find that some of them use “www.” in front of the domain name (example: www.awebguy.com), and some of them do not. It is very common that both options will take you to the same place on the Internet, or at least the same information. That still does not mean search engines see it the same way as humans.
You can skip right to the bottom of this article to read the fix for this, but I think you will benefit by first understanding what is wrong, and why you should fix it.
Note: Even if both versions of www or without www show the same content (web page, video, image, etc.), the problem is not solved. It is common for web hosts to direct both versions to the same place using DNS (domain name service), but that is not the same as a 301 redirect telling search engines which version is the authoritative domain where the content should be indexed.
It is important to know that the domain name (example: awebguy.com) is the “root domain”. Anything coming before the awebguy.com, such as ftp.awebguy.com, pop.awebguy.com, smtp.awebguy.com and etcetera denotes a SUBdomain. Yes, of course, this includes www.awebguy.com, because it is a subdomain, too! An easy way to drive this home is to go to mail.google.com or to www.google.com … they are clearly different.
Now that we understand this point, let’s think of the www and non-www versions as two completely different domains. If somebody links to your website (and let’s hope they will) which one should they be linking to? Using a 301 redirect will actually reflect the correct address in the browser address bar, making it more likely that they will choose the right version when they want to link to your website. That is because before your web server even sent the page to the person visiting your website, it knew which version to send. In the event that somebody gets it wrong, a 301 redirect will tell search engines that the content they linked to is actually at the other location where it should be indexed.
Note: In order to know for certain what your web server is telling people, you must check your server’s HTTP response headers. Don’t worry, I made you a handy little tool to check your website.
What you want to know is whether the header begins with a “HTTP/1.1 200 OK” response, or a different response such as “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”. Only one of the versions will return the 200 OK, while the alternate version may return something else … and perhaps even something unexpected. I made this really easy to check your server’s response headers here:
An easy way to see this in action is to type my web address into a browser with either version. If you type it in without the “www”, my web server will know what you meant, and it will deliver the document (web page) at the proper address at the www subdomain – with a “200 OK” status. This will also work similarly for every page on the domain / subdomain, because I use a 301 redirect that simply redirects everything at awebguy.com to its exact equivalent representation with the correct www address.
The SEO “WWW” Fix: HTACCESS and 301 Redirect
Since many people do not configure and manage their own web servers, this is the easiest fix for most websites. If you have access to your main server configuration, use that, but this is simply not the case for most website owners. This solution uses very simple “distributed configuration files” known as “htaccess” which allow you to configure functions on a directory level.
OK, now that I drove you out of your comfort zone with some big techie language, just breathe slowly and get your heart rate back to normal. I am not going to force feed you a bunch of web programming. The fix is actually quite easy, or at least it will be easy if you pay attention. If you own a website and any of this is just too complicated, it would be like owning a car and not knowing how to put gas in it. Should that person really be driving? This is not like rebuilding your car’s transmission … it is like filling it with gas.
The “htaccess” is just a simple little text file you can create and edit with a text editor such as Notepad, SimpleText, or Vi. If you already have an existing htaccess file, you may simply edit it to include additional functions at the bottom of the existing content. Don’t be afraid of it, because it is really not very tricky. It may sound tricky when you consider all the things it can do, but it is normally just a small file with a minimal amount of text in it.
Htaccess is a configuration file that tells your server certain things to do when people ask for your web pages or other website content. It can be used for functions such as password protecting a directory, blocking selected people from accessing your website, and much more. The file name does not look like a lot of them you may see, such as hello.txt or mynameisfred.html, but don’t let that scare you. The htaccess file will begin with a dot (yes, a dot … like this one .) and the full file name is actually “.htaccess“.
You can have multiple of these “.htaccess” files within your website, but the one we are talking about is in the “root directory”. Stop! Don’t get frustrated … that just means it is right there in the same place where your home page and other files are. For example, the file http://www.awebguy.com/murnahan.pdf is in my root directory, but if it was at http://www.awebguy.com/other-directory/murnahan.pdf it would be found in the “other-directory” directory.
If you do not already have any .htaccess files in your website, don’t worry. You can just create one from scratch with a text editor, save it to your computer as htaccess.txt, and then upload it to your website and rename it “.htaccess”.
Within this magical .htaccess file, it will look almost just like plain old English language, and should not be overwhelmingly technical. I will use my own domain name for the examples, but you would of course want to change that to your own. Well, unless you want to redirect your website visitors to my blog, and that is fine, too. There is a lot you can do with this, but I don’t want to explode any heads with all of this technical junk. Technical junk really is like using explosives, sometimes!
I mostly want to explain how to create a 301 Permanent Redirect from either your www to non-www or from non-www to www. In order to do this, all it takes is either editing your existing htaccess file and adding the selected version below into the file, or creating a new htaccess file with the same. You can change the domain to any domain you like, but you will probably want to change it from mine.
Remember to always create a backup copy of anything you edit. If you mess it up and you want me to play a sad tune on my violin, I get paid overtime for that! 🙂
Example of a 301 Permanent Redirect of WWW to Non-WWW
This is the code to use in your htaccess file for redirecting content to the non-www version of your website.
There are many other handy things you can do with this, and some examples are below. Note that each of these should be created on a single line within the htaccess file.
Example of a 301 Permanent Redirect (note the local address then a space, and then the new URL)
Know Your Server’s Response Codes!
Even the difference in a slash at the end of an address makes the difference of a good “200 OK” response or a “301 Moved Permanently” or worse. You should be aware of the difference it makes.
I will reiterate … I made this really easy to see what your server is returning for any given web address. Check it here if you are not entirely sure:
Here are some additional resources about htaccess usage:
Well, there you have it … my answer to www vs. non-www and how to fix it easily with 301 redirect using htaccess. I told you I would make it simple. I welcome your feedback!
