Systems Cowboy

This is pretty basic but essential for good SEO.

If you have a site and the http://systemscowboy.com and http://www.systemscowboy.com both show up as separate URL’s, you need to redirect one to the other so you don’t have two separate URL’s displaying the exact same content.

Here’s how to use your .htaccess file to redirect non-www URL’s to www:

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

This will make it so somebody who types in http://systemscowboy.com will automatically be redirected to http://www.systemscowboy.com.

There was a good article in the New York Times this week about J.C. Penney gaming the Google search engine results with paid links here.

SEO people have known for ages that this type of thing works. Google has penalized the J.C. Penney site because of this high profile article (and the site has thus plummeted in the Google rankings, just as they did to the terrible eyeglass shop DecorMyEyes when their article hit the New York Times a little while ago here…