I came across a post on the Links Juice blog last night that presented a top 10 list of tips for start up directories. The one which caught my eye was the .htaccess URL rewrite as I have seen many general directory owners fail to implement it I wanted to see if the same was true of bidding directories.

I did a quick scan through some of the bidding directories on the Bidilicious list and found that quite a few of them have also neglected to implement this safeguard against duplicate content penalties.

As you cannot control who is linking to your web site you cannot advise them to use the www. prefix (or not) when they place that link. The search engines will follow these links and potentially decide that your site has duplicate content.

You can avoid such a penalty with just a couple of minutes of your time. In addition it will also ensure that any link juice from people linking to your site incorrectly is still carried through to the correct version of your site.

If you want your site to use the www. prefix in all cases, copy the following code into a file, save it using the name .htaccess and upload it to the root of your web site. Ensure that you replace ‘yourdomain’ with your domain

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

If you want to do it the other way and force all requests to work without the prefix, just swap around the www. in the above code.

Thats all there is to it, very simple quick method for protecting your site and ensuring all link juice is directed to the correct domain.