Does Your Photography Website Have a Twin and Not Know It?

The question is: Does your website have a twin and not know it?

The answer is: More than likely.

We’ll be getting a little technical here, but the concept is simple and it’s important to get resolved early on. It has to do with the little “www” that either appears or doesn’t appear when you look at the address bar when visiting your photography website.  It’s OK to have one or the other, but it’s not OK to have both.

We want to establish a “Canonical” website address, which is just a fancy way of saying a default website address so that one takes precedence over the other.

Let’s do a little test…

Type in your url as such:
www.yourdomain.com

Does the “www” disappear or does it stay?

Now type in yourdomain.com, does it stay like that or does it display a “www”?

If both times they redirect to the same thing (either both ways result in a “www” or both ways result in it not being displayed) then you’re golden.

If you try both urls and they don’t change when you type them in, you have a twin. And it’s not a cute giggling twin like in the picture above, it’s more like an evil twin that sucks away your potential Google rankings.

What does that mean and how can you have both?

The “www” is actually a sub-domain which stands for “World Wide Web”, but since all websites are on the World Wide Web and use the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (big fancy words for that HTTP thing you see in front of your URL), it’s redundant.

But having a sub-domain isn’t really that big of a deal. The real concern is having two websites. The implications directly affect your Google, Bing and Yahoo rankings because you may not really be sure which website (the WWW version or the Non-WWW version) is in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP for short). So this can be an issue when you are building links to your website for SEO purposes.

Hook a Tog up, what should I do?

The simple answer is to redirect one site to the other with a special kind of redirect called a “301 Redirect” which tells the search engines which url you prefer to use.

The less simple answer is that there is a potential for losing a little bit of that “Google Juice” that you’ve worked so hard on building, and an SEO expert can help put together a really good plan on determining which you should stay with if you have a twin website. What an SEO expert will look at is the age of your domain, and the number of links you have coming to both the www and non-www sites and make a decision on which way to redirect the site.

Now for you DIY photographers out there here’s how you can do it yourself if you want to eliminate the “www”:

• 1. Log into your FTP account (if you’re already scratching your head, the DIY approach is probably not the approach to take right now).
  2. In your public_html folder look for a file called .htaccess
  3. If you have one download it to your computer. If you don’t have one make a new text file and name it htaccess.txt
  4. Open your file and place the following line of code in the file, replace “domain-name” with your actual domain name.
     RewriteEngine On
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain-name.com
     RewriteRule (.*) http://domain-name.com/ [R=301,L]

     RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain-name.com
     RewriteRule (.*) http://domain-name.com/ [R=301,L]

  5. Close and save the file.
  6. Upload to your FTP server.
  7. If you created the file new, then make sure you rename your file to .htaccess after it has been uploaded.

You’re done. Now when you type in http://www.domain-name.com, it will redirect to http://domain-name.com.

Whew!!! That one was technical! I promise next time I’ll come up with a super low-tech post that will help you in your quest for SEO domination and getting more clients through Google. But until then if you have questions or comments please post below and I’m always available to help you with your website challenges.

William Bay is a San Diego Wedding Photographer, and runs the Flaunt Your Site, specializing in SEO and web design for Photographers, Artists, and Musicians. When he’s not photographing, SEO’ing, or designing he’s dreaming about surfing the perfect peeling reef breaks in the Mentawai Islands.

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