Protect Search Engine Rankings - Parked Domains

[Deverill]

Hey gang!

 

I have a website for my church - covenantwordchurch.org. I have built very good rankings on search engines, especially Google, and was very happy.

 

Recently my pastor wanted to create cwckw.org as an easier way to get to it - he doesn't like typing too much I guess. As a result of this, I noticed my ranking in Google dropping and acting weird. The problem was that Google was spidering cwckw.org and all my inbound links are to the longer name. Not a good situation.

 

I went looking for a solution and found it. I added the following code to my .htaccess which "converts" everything to the longer name. Now inbound links and the spider following internal links all match.

 

>Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.covenantwordchurch\.org [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.covenantwordchurch.org/$1 [R=301,L]

 

This will turn cwckw.org into www.covenantwordchurch.org anytime it is accessed. To see it in action go to the short name and look at your browser address bar - it will be redirected to the longer name. The theory, which time will prove or disprove, is that the shorter address will disappear as far as the search engines are concerned which is fine by me because it will keep all benefits at the same place and not spread my "popularity" over multiple names.

 

Disclaimer: I didn't write this and it will take a month or two to see any results on Google. YMMV.

[stevevan]

Interesting! Keep us posted on the results!