Catch All that Traffic with Extra DNS
OK, I have been uber busy on a few projects of late, some offline as well as online but I had a meeting the other day and said something that I thought was obvious but few people actually do it.
I am of course referring to catching mistypes of the www.
No I like to catch non www and 301 them to the root, which is easy and good safeguard in the potential dupe content, but what about actual users who try and type your url in. Lots of traffic is lost when only 2 or 4 “w’s” are typed in direct.
Solution: Create extra DNS entries for “ww.yourdomain.com” and “wwww.yourdomain.com” and then 301 these to the www version.
I don’t do it on this site as I can’t be arsed, but that does not mean it is not worth it. If you have a brandable url or one where you get significant type ins then you need to think about this.
Cheers
Rich
On apache you can catch every mistype with a single virtual host without having to have loads of seperate VHs one for each mistype. Saves a bit of time and cleans up the apache config a bit.
Good point though.
But if the DNS does not resolve, and generally ww and wwww don’t no server setting in the world will help 🙂
In this case, you can set wildcards 😉
Y mean, you can set *.domain.com as a DNS zone for the domain entry.
🙂
Wildcards and wildcard 301’s then otherwise you can get monster amounts of duplicate content. I have seen someone do this by accident, a world of pain!