These are really nice FAQs and helpful too.
this is truely a nice article. Thank you.
Thanks stymiee! Something new I found out about 301 to redirect to www.
Now, how effective is the code you mentioned?
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\\.example\\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I tried using it on my http://www.sadikhov.com web site, but thanks God I noticed immediately that it negatively affected my other http://www.sadikhov.net web site, so that when I typed the domain name, with .net, it redirected to .com/net
Can this be slightly tweaked not to affect other sites on the same server?
Great information! Thanks!
I may be crazy, but it seems to me that doing this won’t accomplish anything.
No PR is ever “lost”, it is just distributed from page to page (across all the sites on the Internet). If you ban the crawlers from a particular page, all you’re doing is stopping that page being indexed AND from passing out PR. So even it contains thousands of links to other sites and only one internal link, you are effectively lowering the “overall PR” of your site by eliminating that one internal link. The outbound links don’t “lower” your PR, they just lower the amount that the outbound linking page is able to pass on.
Consider this…
If index.php links to test.php and test.php contains thousands of outbound links, does that effect the PR of index.php?
Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m very interested in this 
If I cant find the other sites links page in the serps, I dont swap links with them.
So if you use that robots.txt trick stymiee is talking about, I wont exchange links with you. Why would I?
The thing is…by almost all explanations of how PR works, that robots.txt trick is useless for preserving PR. In fact, it will do the exact opposite.
WOW, this is great information, and I think everyone could learn or take way with a great reinforcing comments to take away! Thanks again!
Definitely some excellent information. I didnt have a chance to comment right away, but I read it on the first day it came out, and I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Now I need to head into doing more research to perfect these techniques
Well - I would strongly advise against any links that “don’t work”, but if you mean that the structure of your site has changed and you’d like google to update its records, then yes, Larry, Sergei and co. have provided you with a tool for precisely that task:
In French, [url=https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login?hl=en]English and even [url=https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login?hl=nl]Dutch (sorry, couldn’t find Flemish).
Apache Rewrite engine only processes strings after the domain name (i.e. after the first slash). So, you cannot use it to rewrite from one domain name to another.
Thank you Stymie. Very nice post. The rel=“nofollow” tag really helps.
Fantastic.
Also, Google also only displays the number of backlinks to one specific page. This is usually the homepage since that is what most webmasters check for. Yahoo, and other search engines, report the number of incomming links per domain.
Are you sure about that? For a site of mine, I just typed this is yahoo, for the main page:
link:http://www.site.com (showed 25k results)
Then I typed this in
link:http://www.site.com/page/ (showed 114k results)
Not true.
You can match on the HTTP_HOST and then rewrite the entire request to an entirely different domain, should you desire.
I’m lost on the “search shortcut” section. I clicked on the link and was taken to example.com. It didn’t tell me how many incoming links I have. I know it’s something simple, but what am I doing wrong?
You clearly know you stuff good work!
This is a great thread! Thanks very much. I like the htaccess method of eliminating duplicate pointers to the domain.
I was wondering if anyone can show me how to take that a step further. Using vBulletin, it loves to redirect people to the home page as “index.php”. This is a bit annoying because the place where I want page rank most (home page) is constantly being seen as a different page (and has a separate page rank). I’m trying to solve that.
I just want to eliminate index.php everywhere it is found.
so this:
http://www.example.com/index.php
becomes:
and this:
http://www.example.com/index.php?this=1&that=2
becomes:
http://www.example.com/?this=1&that=2
I have tried to mess around with mod_rewrite but I swear it just doesn’t like me. :fangel: 
This link doesn’t work anymore ->webmasterbrain
This tool is no longer available on WebmasterBrain. It has since moved to the SEO Chat website.
very nice faq.thanks for writing it. it help me a lot. i wanted to know more about googlebombing
Thats a great help … Thanks a lot …