Losing Page Rank & Not Being Listed in Search - No www

The goal of this blog is to help you earn income on your website or blog. You can't do this if your site has a poor Page Rank (PR) or doesn't show up in your searchs on Yahoo or Google. We have another website associated with this blog and it was launched in September of 2006. At first, it appeared 1st in both Yahoo & Google when searching for my sites keywords. After a month or so, it remained #1 on Yahoo, but fell to pages 10, 11, 12. Sometimes it was never listed, and other times it was #1 again. We attributed this fluxuation to it being a new site and ignored the problem.

But on Saturday, Nov 18th, we had a crisis. If the site could be found on Google, it worked. But, from Yahoo, it didn't allow users to log in. The site wasn't changed and we knew that the problem had to be centered in either Yahoo, Google, or our website host. After hours of searching, we realized that when the site was entered using www.dummyname.com, from Google, it worked. But Yahoo's link was only dummyname.com, without the www, and this didn't work. We added a Javascript onload function to redirect dummyname.com to www.dummyname.com, and this kept us going.

After that, the site dropped from #1 in Yahoo, to #11, and then it couldn't be found. Our crisis was back and this had to be resolved. After lots of searching, we found that this often happens because the two URL's are actually different! Two things needed to be done to resolve this:

1. Using Google's Webmaster Tools, we set the Preferred domain.
2. In our site's home directory on our host, we added a 301 permanant redirect.

The Google Webmaster Tools are very handy and useful. If you don't have this, it's a must. You need to have a Google account to use this tool. So, if you don't have these, get them ASAP. Once done, go into the "Diagnostic" tab in Webmaster Tools. There you will have 3 choices for your preferred domain: with a www; without a www; or no preference. Our site was set to "no preference" and thus the Google PR problem. We appeared twice in the search index, one with the www and one without. That's why our site appeared in different places. We fixed this problem by choosing option 1, with "www" and our results became more predictable. It takes about 2 weeks or so for this to take effect in all of Google's servers.

Next we addressed Yahoo. Because Yahoo listed us without the "www" and we wanted that to be our preferred site, we needed to redirect all non-www views to www views. This is done by creating a file called " .htaccess " (no file name, just a filetype) in your home directory on your website host. This directory is where your home or index page is located. Inside the .htaccess file, add the following:

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

Replace "YourSitesName" with yours, and do not have any blank lines.

Now, whenever your site is accessed, you will be permanently redirected to the "www" site if necessary. Because we used the .htaccess file implementation of this, every request to your site will do this. Thus, the change goes in immediately.

Since we only made these changes 2 days ago, we are still waiting for everything to take effect. However, we are now back on page 1 of Yahoo, and more often #1 on Google.

Hope this helps.