Canonicalizing Domains and 301 Redirects

So, what I did tonight to make sure that my new domain doesn’t look like 2 sites to Google is the following:

I used the cpanel of my hosting account to make sure the following commands were in place:

When people request annehaynes.com they are 301 redirected to www.annehaynes.com
When people request queenofsearch.com or www.queenofsearch.com they are redirected to www.annehaynes.com

Why 301s are important to search engine rankings – I've added some search results content for the explanations in this blog post – but this 301 stuff is built into your hosting environment and is a phone call away:

A 301 redirect is the most efficient and spider/visitor friendly strategy around for web sites that are hosted on servers running Apache (check with your hosting service if you aren't sure). It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you *have* to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option.

What the heck is a canonical URL?

Canonical essentially means “standard” or “authoritative”, so a canonical URL for search engine marketing purposes is the URL you want people to see. Depending on how your web site was programmed or how your trackings URLs are setup for marketing campaign, there may be more than one URL for a particular web page.

The problem most search engine marketers run into deals with domains. Sometimes if a domain is not setup properly, the domain URL (domain.com) and the www domain.com URL com are considered individual web pages. Since both pages maybe indexed by Google - you could get hit for duplicate content and at the very least you would be splitting your link popularity.