Non-www versus www

Posted by derixc in June 30th 2007

Yipee! I finally got it working. After 2 weeks of trials and errors, my site is now utilizing one domain which is http://yuwoncedric.com. I prefer to use it because nowadays web surfers normally key-in the domain itself on the address bar without the www. You may ask what will be benefit that I can get from it? Well, as a newbie to blogging as well as to web development, I learned that search engines indexed our sites into two different means. One is using a www and the other is a non-www format. Based on the e-book that I have read, search engines like google consider this as two different websites. So, if you’re after to have a good pagerank ratings, then I believe that we should start from using one domain format. My continued research wouldn’t be possible without the help of Mr. John Chow’s e-book regarding making money online. On his e-book, he emphasized the value of using one domain.

By the way, you may ask how I managed to make it working? The answer is simple, modifying .htaccess to have a 301 URL redirect. Simple? Err, for a beginner like me, it sounds too technical especially I don’t have any backgrounds yet on programming. It just so happened that I have a good guide to follow to get this thing started. I begin by backing up my .htaccess file, for security of course if something goes wrong, and then started playing along with it. The way I look at it, you just have to add and type the codes for 301 URL redirect and it should work. I have done that and it didn’t push through. I mean the re-direction works but every time I click on my post and links, it will give me 404 error that the page was not found. I read again and I made sure that I am using the correct format, syntax, spacing and all that but still it won’t.

I also seek assistance from my webhosting service but they don’t provide support for Web development, 3rd party scripts, SEO, consultations and specialized related issues. Their best advise is to read through the module of mod_rewrite. Ok, I did and I checked it. It has some additional codes included that may be of help. I re-write and manually key in all the codes but same frustration is what I got.

Several websites suggested the same mod_rewrite rules on .htaccess but I can’t understand why I am getting that 404 page not found error. I almost give up, sort of. But then I noticed something about the permalink structures. I logged in to wordpress and changed my permalink structure to it’s default setting. Guess what?? It worked! But it doesn’t end there, how come others can use the /%postname%/ permalink structure using the same re-direct? I can now make it work using WP’s default setting as well as Date and name based and Numeric but not with custom setting.

If you check my site now, you will see that the /%postname%/ structure works and I’m not getting that pesky 404 error page anymore. How? with the help of a small and simple wordpress plugin Damn, It took me two weeks understanding Apache Mod_rewrite and asking questions to guru’s just to have this thing working. Oh well, my adventures now on mod_rewite and 301 URL redirects officially ended. I Hope you like this plugin too. Thanks to Photomatt.net for sharing this wordpress plugin!