301 Redirect – The EASY Way

301 REDIRECT THE EASY WAY

Most websites are setup so people can access them with or without the ‘www’ part of the URL. For example, if you go to http://www.joomlart.com or joomlart.com, you will end up at the same place. But technically these are two unique addresses and because of this a search engine doesn’t know which one to index.

This can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. The more links you have pointing to a page, the more important that page appears to a search engine. But if some of those links are pointing to the ‘www’ version of the page and some are pointing to the ‘non-WWW’ version, the overall importance of the page is diminished.
It is best to only have one version active and this is easy to achieve using code known as a 301 redirect code””.

Normally this is done by inserting code into a file on your site called the .htaccess file. If you know how to do that then go ahead. But for many newcomers to Joomla, this can be a little overwhelming, so here is an another solution:

1. Download plgSystemCanonicalization.zip
2. Install it as you would any other extension
3. In Administrator, go to Extensions – Plugin Manager and click System – Canonicalization
4. Set Enabled to Yes
5. In the right column, next to Correct Host, enter your full web address including the www e.g. http://www.your_web_site_name.com
6. Click the Check Setting link and ensure that no errors are displayed.
7. Click Save towards the top right. (VERY IMPORTANT!)
8. Test your website’s frontend by accessing it using your ‘non-www’ URL. If all is well, you will be redirected to the ‘www’ version.

This is a straight-forward process and has worked on several websites I have developed.
If it all goes wrong, here is how to fix it:

Connect to your site using FTP and rename /plugins/system/canonicalization.php.