When you are trying to build links to your website in Google, it is important to decide what you want your site to be indexed as. For example http://www.ijhedges.com and http://ijhedges.com are seen as two different websites. This means that if some people link to one and some link to the other, each 'site' is only credited its share of the links rather than the whole number of links. When you are using Google Webmaster tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools, you can tell Google to treat all http://www.ijhedges.com and http://ijhedges.com as either http://www.ijhedges.com or http://ijhedges.com. This has the effect of recombining the links to your site.

What about if you have a test site such as http://test.ijhedges.com and after testing has finished it becomes your main site. If the old http://test.ijhedges.com domain still points to the same data, it means that your site will get indexed by Google as http://www.ijhedges.com and http://test.ijhedges.com. Anyone who links to the test site domain won't be contributing to the incoming links on your main site. Even worse, it could be seen as duplicate content and some or all of the pages could be dropped from the Google index.

What has this to do with cre8Buzz, I hear you wonder (if you didn't glaze over long ago)? Well, we're all giving cre8Buzz link love, but to a variety of domains. So our love is being spread between http://beta.cre8buzz.com, http://www.cre8buzz.com and http://cre8buzz.com.

One solution for this is to have everyone change every link they have ever made to cre8buzz to be consistant. I have done this here and on my blog, changing all http://beta.cre8buzz.com links to http://www.cre8buzz.com.

Alternatively, if the webserver is a Linux server, it might be possible to use an apache rewrite rule in the .htaccess file for the site.

I guess something like this would probably work:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^beta.cre8buzz.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.cre8buzz.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This creates a 301 (permanent) redirect for search engines (and users) to the www.cre8buzz.com version of the page.

This would also resolve the annoying feature of having to keep logging in to the other (beta/www) version of the website when you open a link.