One of the most important SEO tasks that you should undertake on your web site is the ‘Canonical Redirect’.
Under normal circumstances, the URL’s
- georgerossphotography.com
- www.georgerossphotography.com
are considered separate entities from a search engine optimization perspective. I recently re-branded my photography business from DIGITALphotoconcept.com to georgerossphotography.com and when I rebuilt the site I added my blog into the directory georgerossphotography.com and everything seemed fine…but it wasn’t!
One of the great SEO advantages of installing a blog into your site is that the blog entries will add to your sitemap (.xml) and will maintain site freshness.
After the bulk of the work was done, I looked a little closer at my sitemaps and something appeared off. The Sitemap.xml page was only 204 pages long and that did not pass the sniff test. So, when I dug a little deeper I noticed that my sitemap generator was indexing www.georgerossphotography.com and not georgerossphotography.com. Argh!
Solution:
1) Set the sitemap generator to index georgerossphotography.com
2) Add a canonical redirect to the sites root .HTACCESS file
The code for the redirect was:
Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.georgerossphotography.com$
[NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://georgerossphotography.com/$1 [R=301,L]
With these two changes my sitemap file increased from 204 pages to 327 pages and I consolidated all of my search engine juice into one place. Phew!
If you ever wondered about whether or not you should add a blog to your business web site just look at the difference in the size of the site’s sitemap file with and without the blog. That is a lot of additional content for the search engines to index.