Redirecting WWW for seo purposes...Easier said than done.

Prevailing "SEO wisdom" is that you should make sure to have the http://www.domain.com/ and http://domain.com/ directed to each other to concentrate your link power. I was just looking at how we might accomplish this. It's a little more complicated than it sounds.

There are two options for redirecting http://time4learning.com/ to http://www.time4learning.com/ says by CTO.

We are currently hosted on a Windows (IIS) platform at Verio which has some limitations in terms of being able to globally redirect pages from "time4learning.com" to http://www.time4learning.com/. Below are 2 options for your review. Currently all traffic from http://www.time4learning.com/ is technically being served by pages from time4learning.com.

(1) Use .Net technology to globally route any incoming request that doesn't have the "www" in front of it to the corresponding http://www.time4learning.com/ page. The issue with this approach is that .Net only handles ".aspx" pages. Since our site has both ".html" and ".aspx" pages we would have to configure the hosting platform to route ".html" pages through the .Net pre-processor. The pages would be rendered the same way as normal HTML pages, the downside is that we may experience a slowdown of page delivery as the ".html" pages would now be going through a pre-processing stage instead of just being served up. This would also put an additional load on the server. At this time, I do not know how significant are these issues. This option can be easily turned "on" and "off", so if there are problems, we can certainly address them quickly.

(2) Currently our main web account at Verio is "time4learning.com", this is technically where the website is hosted. Requests to "www" are handled by this domain. Verio is suggesting that we can create another website domain, specifically called http://www.time4learning.com/ copy our current time4learning.com site over to the new http://www.time4learning.com/ and then very easily re-route any traffic coming to "time4learning.com" to "www". Unfortunately, we cannot do the reverse. This option is not easily turned "on" or "off" and may require some downtime while we copy the site over and make sure everything is working. The issue is that once we create a "www" site, traffic will start to flow to it, so we have to carefully plan this type of move. Ultimately, this is probably the more correct of the options, but certainly carries some element of risk via downtime. The downtime can be managed to a minimum.

Dear readers, what would you do? I'm willing to pay for a real answer to this question. Contact me for details. (this is revised)



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