2005/07/23 Server aliases vs. Redirects

I've been running the Netcraft toolbar for more than a month now. The other day I happened to notice something I thought was odd: the Netcraft ranking for this site has been steadily decreasing (in other words, becoming more popular), but as I was looking at a particular page, I noticed that the ranking had suddenly changed by 33% in the wrong direction. How could that be? I doubted Netcraft recalculates ranking so often as to cause such a sudden change, but there it was, staring me in the face. What could be wrong?

Ahh. There it was: I had gone to "www.aplawrence.com" rather than my usual lazy "aplawrence.com". Apparently Netcraft sees these as different sites, and ranks them differently. Interesting..

The "www" was just an alias in the conf file:

ServerName aplawrence.com
ServerAlias www.aplawrence.com
 

You get the same content with "www", but Netcraft doesn't know that, so they rank it differently. Solving that was easy enough: I moved the "ServerAlias www.aplawrence.com" to the pcunix.com website, which does a 301 Redirect to aplawrence.com. Restarting Apache now redirects any "www" access to the unadorned site. That should eventually have the effect of merging the Netcraft ratings into one.

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