Redirecting WWW.website.com to website.com

Question

I ranked my site at Nibble.com and i was going through everything, checking for ways to improve my website, and I noticed that www.website.com was classed as a duplicate of website.com. How do I redirect them? I'm using Godaddy services.

Answer 1

This is a common issue for most and the way you combat this problem is to either force www. or force remove www. meaning the site can be only accessed one way and if anyone attempts to access it another way than intended it simply redirects them with or without www depending on what you prefer.

In your case you want to remove www. and ensure that no content is found by Google as duplicate so a simple fix is to edit your .htaccess or create one in the route of your hosting folder.

TO REMOVE FORCE WWW. USE

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nibble.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://nibble.com/$1 [R=301,L]

TO FORCE ADD WWW. USE (YOU DON'T NEED THIS BUT MAYBE OTHER READERS DO)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nibble.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.nibble.com$1 [R=301]

Answer 2

It's very simple with GoDaddy. first of all, GoDaddy has the best technical support, you would probably get better and faster answers to any question that you have about their services if you just contact them.

Searching in GoDaddy's support, here is what I found:

The www before your domain name is a subdomain, not part of the domain name itself. Therefore, if you set up your www CNAME record to point to your primary A record, your site will resolve both at www.coolexample.com and coolexample.com.

To Check or Edit Your Domain Name's CNAME Record

1. Log in to your Account Manager.
2. Next to Domains, click Launch.
3. From the Tools menu, select DNS Manager.
4. Click Edit Zone for the domain name you want to update. The Zone File Editor displays.
5. In the CNAME (Alias) section, click the www record.
6. In the Points to field, type @ to map the alias directly to your domain name.
7. Click Save Zone File, and then click OK.

Any DNS changes you make can take up to 48 hours to reflect on the Internet.