Congratulations, you did it! You’ve made yourself a website! Your dreams of creating a site all about hand-turkeys has come to fruition and it’s finally live. However, you can’t enjoy the launch as the irksome URL is pushing your obsessive compulsive buttons. As it stands, people can either go to http://www.handturkey.com, or just http://handturkey.com. You need clarity of bird-fingered vision. You also know that the Google sees those as two separate sites with duplicate content. This angers the Google. This makes the Google think you are a plagiary. You are most certainly not.

You can right this wrong by rewriting it. That is, you can rewrite the URL using a .htaccess file on your server as long as you are running Apache (there is also a Windows IIS module that emulates this). You decide you want to force everyone to use www.handturkey.com because it’s more professional. You create a file named .htaccess into the root of handturkey.com. Within this file you place the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.handturkey.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.handturkey.com/$1 [R=301]

Et voila! Visitors are now forced to www if they don’t type it in. Google sees this and recognizes that both these sites are the same. It apologizes for insinuating you were a thief. It had a rough week and it totally took it out on you. You and Google bury the hatchet, and handturkey.com sells for a quarter of a billion dollars to a Dutch conglomerate.