configuring a permanent 301 redirect

[Pilgrim]

I am concerned that search engines may think that my site www.mctooling.com and mctooling.com are two different sites.
For example, www.mctooling.com as less inbound links whereas mctooling.com has more links. It could appear to the search engine that I am trying to mirror my site.
It should also help to improve search engine rankings by getting all inbound links and pages are correctly counted for the website.

Firstly should I be concern and if so, how do I go about configuring a permanent 301 redirect?

[mattc]

URL query

www. is basically a subdomain that points at the root directory. im pretty sure this will affect your rank in search engines - if half your links point to one and half to the other.

e.g. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&c...om&btnG=Search

brings up different results to

http://www.google.com/search?client=...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

there are several ways to do a 301 - depending on your server type/language availability

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php shows you the various different ways of doing it.

perhaps the most simple would be to use php

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php will check if it will work with search engines

[Mike Hughes]

Personally I wouldn't use PHP as you'll have to configure your web server to parse every web page so it can run any php code it finds. This increases the load on the server and slows down the serving of web pages.

far better to use the advice of Matt Cutts at Google. This page and it's links will tell you everything you need to know including how to set up the redirects and how to tell Google the preferred root page of your domain:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonicalization-update/

Mike

[Pilgrim]

301 redirect

Thanks for your help guys|!

I carried out the suggested Google solution to make "301 redirect" changes to my site URL, and today when I check, my site the page number have gone up, and it's now showing the correct number of links as well