My SEO Consultant tells me to consolidate my domains using 301 Redirects. How can I achieve this?

 

It is common for websites to be accessed via a number of different urls. For example site owners sometimes take out variants of the primary domain name such as .com/.org/.net and various mis-spellings and alternate names.

Normally all these names are aliased to the same content at the webserver, the same content appears regardless of the url entered.

The reason this becomes a problem for SEO is that when a search engine spider encounters identical content on multiple urls, the scoring algorithm may decide to lower the score for that content (as it appears just to be copies) and so the site appears lower down in the results.

 

A 301 Redirect is a way of telling the search engine spider that the alternate urls are only aliases, and to direct them to the primary domain. 301 is the code for 'Moved Permanently'

 

To achieve this you should add the following instructions to a file called '.htaccess' which should be placed in the document root of your site.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}                !myprimarydomain\.com [nc]

RewriteRule (.*)                      http://myprimarydomain.com  [r=301] 

 

These instructions say "If the host requested is not myprimarydomain.com, then redirect to myprimarydomain.com with a permanently moved code"