I just went through one of my old conduit sites doing some housekeeping and discovered a simple thing I overlooked that could easily boost my rankings.

What I discovered is that I hadn’t done a www. rewrite before and was getting hit by a duplicate content penalty.

If you don’t know what this is, Google thinks that http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com are two seperate sites and indexes them as such, thus giving you a duplicate content penalty because there’s two seperate and identical sites on the web and Google doesn’t like duplication.

The Fix is to modify your .htaccess file to include this code:

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

To modify this file you can login to your Cpanel and then click on File Manager, the trick here is to make sure the checkbox that says, “show .hidden files” or something along that line is checked.  You’ll then see your .htaccess file there and then click on it and edit it adding the code above.

Just make sure you replace “www.yourdomain.com” with your real domain

Good luck and have fun!