Not all webmasters are aware that search engines view each URL as a different page, even it has the same content or is different from the other URL by ending with a slash or if it preceeded by a www or not. To serve only one version of the page to get the deserved traffic, you’ll need to remember a couple of things about fixing URL issues.

www and non-www

The simplest matter is having both versions of a domain, the one with www and the one without (smart developers even call this URL canonicalization issue, but I believe – or hope – there has to be an easier term for this). The search engines view them as two separate sites with identical content and regard links pointing to them accordingly. Though they each get their own share of traffic, you can get more traffic by having just one version, because the links would be pointing to one site, thus boosting its search engine rankings.

To redirect a site from the non-www version to the www version, you can insert the following code in your .htaccess file:

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


• Replace yoursite.com with your domain
• copy the code to your .htaccess file to your root (main) folder on your server
• refresh your page (press the “Refresh” button, F5, Ctrl+R or anything that works for you)

It’ll only work for Unix platforms with Apache and mod_rewrite enabled. If it doesn’t work after refreshing the page, make sure you do have Unix hosting and contact your support to check if they have mod_rewrite enabled. If they don’t, I’d suggest switching hosting.

Read more about using 301 (permanent) redirects with .htaccess.

URLs with and without slashes

Though it is technically easy to understand that www and non-www sites are different, how about understanding that pages with and without slashes in the end of the URL are different, too, according to the search engines. That’s why you only need to have one version of those.

If you have a WordPress blog, then a simple Permalink Redirect plugin will help. I have recently installed it on my site and it works like a charm.

For other websites, you’ll need to check your Apache version with your hosting and go to the according section of the Apache manual. Here are the links:

• Apache 1.3
• Apache 2.0
• Apache 2.2

To me, the code samples in the guide look the same. I also didn’t manage to make them work – probably due to conflicts with WordPress, or something. You can discuss the topic or ask questions about the trailing slash issue at Cre8asite Forums.

Having unique, accessible pages

Suppose you have pages with the same content on your article and you want to only have one page, but don’t want to lose the link weight or decrease the experience on your website. Then you need to 301 redirect (probably a PHP one) one page to another.

A 301 redirect (as well as .htaccess redirect) can be very helpful in solving duplicate content and broken links (if you have links pointing to a page that doesn’t exist) and is mostly the only cure to the problem.

The feeds

If you have a blog or just serve RSS feeds to your visitors, you should consider blocking them from the robots through the robots.txt file, because it’ll help filter out duplicate content from their indices (feeds have the same content as your main site, remember?).

A good start could be inserting the following code in the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed/atom/
Disallow: /feed/rss/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /#comment


Alternatively, you can try using the following code to block spiders from indexing feeds for all pages:

Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$


Read more about duplicate content and feeds at The Van Blog – be sure to check the comments, too.

Note: the above code seems to work for GoogleBot only (or for other bots, supporting the * wildcard.

Let me know if you have a better solution for blocking duplicate content with robots.txt.

How to avoid duplicate content

When developing your website, you need to remember a couple of things to keep your content more unique (both to the people and the search engines):

• it is better to have less pages, but of more quality, because it’ll interest more people, attract links to the same place and drive more visitors from the search engines
• have clean URLs: no dynamic parameters, less folders (it doesn’t matter much, whether you have words in your URLs or not, though, but it helps – a tiny, weeny bitty bit)
• always write unique content, don’t copy it from others: it doesn’t give you credibility, won’t drive visitors to your site, and without a credit link it is also a theft of copyrighted material
• when you link to pages, pick one URL for a page, and use it to link to it wherever you can (for example, always link to domain.com/, instead of also linking to domain.com, domain.com/index.php)

Read more on how you can get rid of duplicate content on the Google’s Official Blog.

Keeping your site content unique, you will get more visitors from the search engines, because all your incoming link weight will be associated with a single page, thus making it more visible. Partly, correct indexing will help get your real content pages out of the supplemental index. That being said, don’t be obsessed with supplemental results. Focus on your customers.

Conclusion

By knowing how you can keep your site unique, you can easily increase your chances of getting more search engine visitors. Granted, this process is fairly easy and can be done within a day with the right education. So, you are still not looking at your site? Here’s what you should look at:

• whether your site has feeds
• whether your site has pages with same content, but different URLs
• whether accessing your non-www version gets you to the www version (or visa versa), or not – if not, check the .htaccess code above
• your .htaccess file (in the root folder)
• your robots.txt file (in the root folder as well)

Enjoy, and may Google be with you.

Comments

Several top level domains have come along in recent years to complement the .com, .net, and .org that have been available to the public. Dot com started life as the domain for commercial organizations, and over the years has become the must-have domain for one’s business name.

Topix has been Topix.net for quite some time. Skrenta wants the dot com credibility, not to mention making it easier for people to find the news aggregator site. When it comes to the Web, people tend to think in terms of dot com.

Skrenta told the Wall Street Journal about the concerns he has with the change. Sites that make name changes without accounting for the ways search engines look for them could make a website invisible to searchers.

Redirection, particularly the issues with using 302 redirects, has been an issue of contention between webmasters and Google in particular. As the dominant search engine, Google can determine a website’s success. Skrenta fears what a mishap with redirecting people from Topix.net to Topix.com could do for the site:

Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10%, that would essentially be a 10% loss in ad revenue, Mr. Skrenta says. "Because of this little mechanical issue, it could be a catastrophe for us," he says.

Skrenta also experienced the palpable frustration shared by many site publishers when dealing with Google:

Further frustrating him is that Google’s response to Topix’s plea for help was an email recommending that, if the switchover were to go badly, the company should post a message on an online user-support forum; a Google engineer might come along to help out. "This can’t be the process," Mr. Skrenta says. "You’re cast into this amusing, Kafkaesque world to run your business."

Amusing, maybe, but no one at Topix will be laughing if Topix vanishes from the Google realm. In the same article, Google’s Matt Cutts said the post-and-wait support strategy ‘is more reliable than it sounds.’

Fortunately, the issue of pleasing the search engines with a redirect can be addressed. Search engines like 301 redirects, which unlike the 302 redirect tells the search engine crawler that the redirect is permanent.

WebProNews Blog Talk contributor Eric Enge discussed 301 redirects in a recent article. In Google, a site Enge moved managed to be recognized properly within two to three weeks.

Skrenta probably will choke on a Pop Tart at the prospect of two to three weeks of uneven traffic. But we see no reason to think Matt isn’t giving Topix good advice, so perhaps Skrenta should just drop in on the relevant Google Group and send out the SOS.

An Example of a Domain Waiting to Fall:

In spite of making 5 figures a month, one of my unappealingly named domain names has cost itself significant credibility and links. Since it is an invisible cost it is hard to estimate how much it has cost, but I have a perfect example of showing how much it hurts.

One time I tried sponsoring an event and they said sure. They got my credit card details and then asked for the domain name. Once they saw the domain name they said sorry they couldn’t accept my money. And this is a reputable content site in a field that is easy to like, but on a junky sounding domain name. Ouch.

Being Honest With Yourself:

If you have a quality legitimate content site, and people who typically sell reviews or links are unwilling to take your money you know it is time for a change.

Other Signs of Trust:

If people who need sponsorship are unwilling to take my money imagine how much a bad domain name suppresses my click-through rate in the search results, and how many other links it cost me. If and when relevancy moves toward an attention based metric I am screwed if my house is built on a cheesy domain name that looks spammy.

Domain Buyer’s Pricing Tips:

You can sometimes capture emerging field names cheaply, but you are probably going to have to spend at least a few grand to get a good name if you are in an established field.

If you are new to domaining, and can’t afford a great .com there are still a lot of great .org and .net names out there available for $1,000 to $10,000.

Is a 301 Redirect Risky?

I will eventually 301 redirect my high ranking ugly domain name to the undeveloped MyKeywords.org domain that I just spent $8,000 buying. Short term I will probably see some drop in traffic, but long-term it is going to be far less risky to create an leverage what looks like a real resource and a real brand.

If you do something like this, make sure you have enough other passive income streams to afford the risk, and keep developing links to the new domain name. Keep that old trusted domain registered and redirecting for many years into the future. If you lose it you will probably lose a large portion of your link authority.

There is No Value in Being Anonymous:

You can spend the money your site is making as a passive income source, but if you believe in what you are doing, and have money in the bank, there is no reason to use a bad domain name. It is like writing nameless.

You can get a decent design for few thousand dollars, or a design modification for a few hundred. You can get good content for $50 a page or less. You can move a CMS for a low price too. The cost of moving and re-branding a non-brand site are negligible compared to the potential upside.

If you ever decide to sell, you are not going to get much out of my-ugly-do-mainz.biz, but if you create a real brand on an undeveloped strong domain name you will be able to sell it for a premium far in excess of the domain name cost.

Comments

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Up until today there were only 2 realistic alternatives to retain some control over your RSS subscribers while using Feedburner for collecting stats.

• Redirect Plugins – Such as the Feedburner Redirect Plugin from Ordered List

– this isn’t a perfect solution because the autodiscovery seems to always resolve before the feed is actually added, which results in a proportion of your sunscribers still subscribed to the Feedburner URL

• Feedburner MyBrand – This is a "pro" feature of Feedburner, and allows you to have Feedburner feeds on a subdomain, such as feeds.yourdomain.com

– this is also not perfect, because that is a subdomain – I haven’t seen a site do anything to create an additional redirect to the subdomain to truly keep it on the same domain, but I am sure something should be possible – it also isn’t free – great for profitable blogs, not so great for lots of niche sites

Now there is an alternative, and it is pretty damn smart…

Feedburner Feeds Stats Hack

Mark has come up with an ingenious little hack to use Feedburner stats on his own feeds with a small patch to one of the WordPress core files.

I haven’t personally tested it yet, but I think Mark shows sufficient proof that it does work.

I am not sure how this works with click tracking, feed flares etc, or the best way to use this for email subscriptions. Also the feedburner feed is still there, and that is desirable for anyone migrating from one method to another. On a fresh site maybe you could make the Feedburner feed private so that you are the only one that accesses it.

You would also have to make sure that Feedburner is fetching a feed that is different to the one that is provided to your subscribers, otherwise you end up with a closed loop.

One major benefit of using Feedburner is that their uptime is very impressive, and they are using their bandwidth to serve your RSS. For many publishers that is quite a significant bandwidth saving.

Hopefully Mark will turn this into a plugin to make it easier to use, especially with the more frequent updates to WordPress these days.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

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Sure, it takes some work to build an extensive network, but eventually many people have gotten their MySpace pages to the point where they might have 1000+ uniques per day running through these pages.

Many slightly devious minds have realized the selling potential of these pages, and place affiliate programs on their MySpace pages, hawking everything from ringtones to jewelry to pr0n and other less ethical products. Now, if you are using MySpace for affiliate marketing, I am sure that you must be somewhat frustrated with the limited freedom you have in creating Myspace pages. In short, they suck.

So, wouldn’t it be nice if you could redirect all of your MySpace visitors to a landing page or website of your choice? Well, this isn’t nearly difficult as you might think. Let’s set up a Flash redirect. To pull this off, you will need a Linux box, and a text editor, and a server of your own somewhere.

First things first, you must install the Ming package. Ming is a library for generating Macromedia Flash files (.swf). This can be done in any Debian based Linux distribution by running:

apt-get install libming-util

Now, in your favorite text editor, create a file with the following text:

getURL("http://www.example.com");

Substitute the URL for the site you want to redirect to in place of www.example.com’ above. Save this file as redirect.as. Now run the command:

makeswf redirect.as

This will produce a file called out.swf. Upload this file to a webserver where you can now fetch it from an external page.

The final step is to include the new flash file in your MySpace page. Include the following code somewhere on your MySpace page:

<embed allowScriptAccess="always" allowNetworking="internal" enableJavaScript="false"
src="http://www.example.com/path/to/out.swf" quality=high
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="200" height="200">
</embed>

Make sure to change the src tag in the code above to point to the location of your out.swf. This will enable you to redirect your visitors to the page you specified when creadting your redirect.as. Good Luck!

P.S this may not work for much longer. MySpace is upgrading to Flash 9. This code may or may not work. The issue is that MySpace is now forcing allowScriptAccess="never" on all embeds, which stops the browser from redirecting. If anyone knows how to avoid this, please comment!

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Did you like this article? Keep up with Brian’s expert search optimization tips and tricks at http://www.caydel.com

Additionally, I knew that I wanted to use a 301 Redirect, since that is commonly held to be more Search Engine Friendly than a 302 Redirect. For those wondering why, a 301 redirect indicates to the visitor or bot that the page has moved permanently to it’s new location, as opposed to a 302 redirect, which indicates that the move is only temporary.

Now, I had never set up a redirect before, so the first thing I did was to Google it. I found a bunch of sites teaching about how to do redirects, but they all made either one or both of the following assumptions:

• I had access to the server httpd.conf
• I only wanted to redirect a single page

I am on shared hosting, thus do not have access to Apache’s httpd.conf. Instead I knew that I had to perform the move in my sites .htaccess file.

Since I wanted to move an entire site rather than a single page, using the instructons given for rewriting a single URL to point to a new location would have become extremely tedious given that I had nearly 500 active URLs at the new location.

Eventually, frustrated by the lack of instruction on the web, I finally turned to #apache on irc.freenode.net, where some helpful people got me finally set up.

How to 301 Redirect an Entire Site in .htacess

If you wish to have all the URL’s in an existing site redirect to your new site, include the following code in the .htaccess file in the root of the old site.

Redirect 301

So, in my case, I added the following line to the .htaccess file in the root of infohatter.com

Redirect 301 /blog http://www.caydel.com

Now, any URL which points to my old blog location is now forwarded to it’s corresponding URL in the new blog. For example, http://www.infohatter.com/blog/monetize-your-blog-3-selecting-your-advertising-strategy/ now redirects all the visitors to http://www.caydel.com/monetize-your-blog-3-selecting-your-advertising-strategy/

301 Redirect for a Single URL in .htaccess

If you have a specific set of pages you would like to move, while leaving the others intact, you can use the following 301 redirect in your .htaccces. Notice that the syntax is the same as we used above to send a whole subdirectory to a new url. This form will also keep any arguments passed along with the URL as a GET or POST request, so that they are available to the redirected page.

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

301 Redirect to your www

I feel somewhat obligated to include this, since this is perhaps the most important redirect in existence, and EVERY SITE SHOULD USE IT.

Many webmasters do not realize that they likely have their entire site duplicated. Google considers www.example.com to be a different site than example.com. The www’ is considered tp be a seperate subdomain,

This presents a problem because if you have links pointing to both versions, Google will split the attributed trust from these links between the two copies of your site. This will result in lower search engine rankings, and lower search traffic to your site. Now this can be eliminated by implementing this simple 301 redirect in your .htaccess.

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

Good Luck – remember that you always want to use a 301 redirect instead of a 302. Always make sure you 301 redirect your non-www’ version of your website to the www’ version for the best Google results.

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He can’t understand why all his subscribers at Get Real (his old blog) haven’t signed up on his new blog.

This raises a bigger issue. Lots of bloggers and podcasters switch URLs and blog platforms. Still you can’t take your Technorati metadata with you. If you use FeedBurner you can redirect your old RSS feed to a new one. TypePad and other platforms let you export your posts. However, Technorati does not let you take what you have amassed somewhere else and port it to your new profile. This is wrong. When is Technorati going to step up and let us manage our reputations?

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

I was recently asked by a client on detailed instructions on how to properly set up a 301 redirect on IIS to redirect a non-www domain to the www domain. This cannot be done in the IIS control panel because when set up the IIS will force the website to loop to itself, thus never loading in a browser properly. In Apache this can be done with a couple of simple lines of code in the .htaccess file. In IIS it is much more difficult…but not impossible.

First off, to be clear, you have two options:

1. You can create a new IP based web site in Internet Services Manager using the mydomainname.com address. You will now have two websites set up in IIS one for www.mydomainname.com and one for mydomainname.com. of course not everyone has an extra IP to do this. If you don’t you can use the option below.

2. You can add another website on the same IP with the host header value (virtual website) option. The second website would be mydomainname.com under the host header domain of www.mydomainname.com.

Once one of these are set up you see both will return a 200 server response when checking the server headers. You can check your headers here:

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

Of course our next step would be to change the server response for mydomainname.com domain to show 301 redirection to www.mydomainname.com. Here is the code you should put in the NEW default home page file for mydomainname.com:

ASP:

< %@ Language=VBScript %>
< %
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", http://www.mydomainname.com
%>

After that check the server header here:

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp

It should show a 301 response and then redirect to www.mydomainname.com.

Of course you could do this without creating a new website by using ISAPI_Rewrite, but this is not available on most hosting accounts. You could install it yourself, but once again not sure if the hoster will even support it for you. IIS can be very yucky sometimes, but using the instructions above you can implement the 301 redirect your looking for.

Jaan Kanellis, is owner and operator of an independent SEO consulting company, www.KBKMarketing.com. Jaan Kanellis distributes his articles through the newly created SEO blog, www.JaanKanellis.com. Feel free to visit these websites and contact him if interested in his consulting services.

A search engine that repeatedly gets a 404 error will de-list the page from its index. Too many 404 error pages on your website and its ranking with the search engines will suffer.

Visitors are always just one click away from clicking to another search and another website. Present them with a page not found 404 error and these days they’ll not stick around long enough to search for your missing page.

How Many 404 Error Pages Do You Have Right Now on Your Website ?

Unless you check your web stat error logs regularly you’ll never know just how many 404 error pages your site has. Even if you don’t have a single 404 error right now, I can absolutely guarantee you’ll get them.

How Can I Avoid 404 Error Pages ?

The simple answer is you can’t, a 404 error can not be avoided.

They happen when you rename a page.

They happen if you delete a page.

They happen if you change the page file extension i.e. htm to html or php.

They happen if you move a page to another location.

They happen if other sites link to pages which don’t exist.

They happen if visitors have bookmarked pages that no longer exist.

They happen if visitors mistype a URL.

How is a 301 Redirect Helpful ?

A 301 redirect enable you to send you visitor or the search engine to any replacement page you specify. A 301 redirect is also important because it’s what’s known as a permanent redirect. A permanent redirect is the one preferred by search engines so they are the only ones you should use if you want your website to be search engine friendly.

How Do I Setup a 301 Redirect ?

Basically there are two ways to setup a search engine friendly redirect. One is by directly modifying what’s known as the .htaccess file found in the root directory of your website where your web pages are stored.

The second way is to use a software redirect script. The advantage of using a redirect script is that you can setup and maintain any number of 301 redirect ‘s through a control panel.

You can also do very clever and helpful things that will make your website even more friendly to visitors and the search engines, but more of that in the 2nd Part of this article.

Setting Up a 301 Redirect Manually

First let’s deal with modifying the .htaccess file to setup a redirect manually just so you know what’s required. Then I’ll tell you a much simpler way to do this and a whole lot more.

First you must find the .htaccess file on your web server. There could be more than one, but you need to locate the one in the same directory as your web pages.

On some web hosts the .htaccess file is hidden, it’s there but you just can’t see it listed when you FTP to your host. On most web servers it’s visible, so I’m only going to deal with the visible file. Download the .htaccess file as ASCII not Binary to your PC then open it with a text editor like Notepad or Textpad, not Word.

In the .htaccess file, type the following line but substituting your locations for the missing and replacement files shown in [ ] brackets, excluding the brackets.

Redirect 301 [relative URL of missing file] [complete URL of replacement file ]

For example:

Redirect 301 /directory/discover.html

http://yourdomain.com/adventure.html

For every other redirect required you must add a new line of code to the .htaccess file then FTP to upload it as an ASCII file back to the same location you downloaded it from.

If all this sounds quite complicated, you’d be right, it can be, but life gets a whole lot easier in the 2nd part of this article Setting Up a 301 Redirect with Redirect Script Software.

Tony Simpson is a Web Designer and Search Engine Optimizer who brings a touch of reality to building a Web Business. He also provides advice on Website Automation at http://www.webpageaddons.com How to create Google Sitemaps is in the continuing part of this article at http://www.webpageaddons.com/stp/googlesitemap

On occasions, you may also want to register several extensions for your domain name: ‘mydomain.com’, ‘mydomain.net’ and ‘mydomain.org’, and have ‘mydomain.net’ and ‘mydomain.org’ automatically redirect visitors to your site, hosted under ‘mydomain.com’.

Furthermore, if your company sells several products, you may want to give each of them an individual domain name, and have it point to a specific subdirectory of your main site. For example, if you own a site called ‘businessvideos.com’ that sells a product called ‘Marketing Made Easy’, you may want to set up a domain such as ‘marketingmadeeasy.com’, and redirect it to subdirectory: www.businessvideos.com/marketingmadeeasy/.

There are several ways to redirect domains, however, most of them will get you in trouble with the search engines. The search engine friendly way to redirect URLs is to use what is know as a 301 redirect (you can see how Google and Yahoo! specifically endorse this kind of redirection). Here is my take about the different redirection methods and their implications on search engine optimization:

Meta-Refresh Javascript Redirect

You can redirect visitors by placing a snippet of javascript code within the HTML code of the page you want to redirect. With this method, you can specify the number of seconds before the visitor is automatically redirected to the new page. Search engines don’t like this method, because of the potential for abuse: you could write an optimized page for a non-competitive search term, and then automatically redirect your unsuspecting visitor to whatever URL you want. For example, it could be relatively easy to write a page about english literature, have it indexed and highly ranked by the search engines, and then redirect your visitor to a casino or Viagra site. If search engines allowed this, users would quickly stop trusting them. That is why search engines penalize this practice, and why you should avoid it.

Parked Domains

You could register an additional domain name, park it, and make it point to the DNS servers of your main site’s hosting account, so that when somebody types the additional domain, they will be transported to your main site. However, this approach may lead to search engines listing the same content twice, one for your main domain, and one for your additional domain. In the past, unscrupulous webmasters would use multiple domains to spam search engines and directories, making them list the same pages hundreds of times under different domains. Even if your intentions are good, we don’t recommend this approach to redirecting your additional domains, since search engines may penalize your site for duplicate content.

302 and 301 Redirects

When a request for a page or URL is made by a browser, agent or spider, the web server where the page is hosted checks a file called ‘.htaccess’. This file contains instructions on how to handle specific requests and also plays a key role in security. The ‘.htaccess’ file can be modified so that it instructs browsers, agents or spiders that the page has either temporarily moved (302 redirect) or permanently moved (301 redirect). It is usually possible to implement this redirect without messing with the ‘.htaccess’ file directly, using your web host’s control panel instead.

>From a search engine perspective, 301 redirects are the only acceptable way to redirect URLs. In the case of moved pages, search engines will index only the new URL, but will transfer link popularity from the old URL to the new one so that search engine rankings are not affected. The same behavior occurs when additional domains are set to point to the main domain through a 301 redirect.

The URL Forwarding Feature

Most domain registrars offer a feature called URL Forwarding. With this feature, you can register a new domain, such as ‘mydomain.net’, and have it point to mydomain.com (or to any other URL). The problem, however, is that registrars usually do this by implementing a 302 redirect (page moved temporarily). While Google handles 302 redirects very well, passing link popularity from the additional domain to the main one, other search engines don’t do this well, diluting link popularity by splitting it between the two domains, and negatively affecting rankings. Therefore, it is better not to use this method, and implement a 301 redirect instead.

Redirecting Old URLs

To ’301 redirect’ an old URL to a new one, just go to your web host’s control panel, and choose the “Redirects” option. You can then set up the redirect by filling the blanks. You want to chose redirect option “Permanent” to implement a 301 redirect.

Redirecting additional domains

To 301 redirect an additional domain (like in the case of the .net or the .org version of your domain name), you have to set it up as an add-on domain with your web host (some hosts offer this option for free, and some others charge a small monthly fee per domain). If the additional domain was not registered with your web host, you will first have to go to your domain registrar and change the DNS (domain name servers) to the DNS of your web host (you may have to wait a couple of days before this change becomes functional). Once you’ve done this, go to your web host’s control panel, choose the “Add On Domains” option, and set up your add on domain as follows:

New Domain Name: additionaldomain.com (Do not put any http:// or www)

Username/directory/subdomain: additionaldomain (Enter ‘additionaldomain’ by itself. Do not put any ‘.com’ or ‘www’)

Password: 123ABC (Enter whatever password you want).

Then, set up the redirection by filling the appropriate box with the URL of the landing page (where you want your traffic to go).

Once your additional domain is redirecting to your landing page, take this one last step to see if everything is working fine: go to a server header checking tool, type your add-on domain in the query box and hit enter. If you get a message similar to this: “Status Code HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”, then your 301 redirect is working.

You can also use 301 redirection for common mispelled versions of your domain name, or for other good domain names that you don’t want your competitors to get.

Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), an internet marketing content site packed with useful articles and resources, and SEO Tutorial (http://www.seotutorial.info) where you can learn the basics of search engine optimization in four easy steps.