: Confusion regarding SEO and a name, c name and 301 redirects I have a VPS with and a domain from different hosters. I would like to know about the best practices for setting up the redirects
I have a VPS with and a domain from different hosters. I would like to know about the best practices for setting up the redirects regarding SEO as I am really confused about the different options.
I want everyone who access mysite.com to be redirected to mysite.com without having a negative impact on my SEO and I want my site to be displayed as example.com in the SERPS.
As far as I can tell I have the following options:
Option 1 (An A record and a CNAME, no redirects)
DNS Level
example.com A record pointing at the IP of my server example.com CNAME to example.com
Server Level
no redirects
Option 2 (Two A records, no redirects)
DNS Level
example.com A record pointing to my server example.com A record pointing to my server
Server Level
no redirects
Option 3 (301 Redirect using either of the above)
I can redirect the example.com domain to example com via htaccess.
Is there any difference SEO-wise based on how I set up the DNS in this case?
Also, what do you think is the best option (or is there a better one I'm missing??
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Everyone has their favorite way of doing this, so long as it's a 301 it's fine, all the methods you've shown are valid. Beyond using a 301 there is no real best practice because everyone's setup is different.
This is mine, using .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ www.yourdomain.com/ [R=301,L]
It's a positive compare, basically, if the domain is NOT yourdomain.com it redirects to yourdomain.com with a 301.
No messing with DNS, no matter what domain the user/bot uses to visit the site they will always end up at yourdomain.com. It's bulletproof, works with search engines, and you can add new domains without changing any settings.
In my experience, using the .htaccess method works great without any noticeable effect on search engine ranking. That said, it would be a very good idea to find any sites linking to you using the non-www version and ask them to change it to the www version.
For setting your preferences on the SERP, you can configure this in Google Webmaster Tools. See this article: support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231
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