Forum Moderators: open
I run a forum using VBulletin software whose content is "mirrored" by the vB archive function (i.e., the "archive", which uses the ForceType directive and is housed within a directory of that name, effectively duplicates much of the content on the forum). Recently Googlebot deep crawled the forum for the first time (the site's been up a year), and over the past few days I have seen literally hundreds of near-duplicate serps for my site: thread1 in "forum" + thread1 in" forum archive," the former--the "original"-- prefixed by www. Other bots (e.g, slurp, scooter) have immediately "recognized" that the archives redirect to the main threads, but not googlebot--at least not yet. Then again, the other bots apparently do not treat www.domain.com and domain.com as two different domains; in fact, to repeat: the only difference in the nearly identical serps (other than the word "archive") is the inclusion of the “www,” in spite of the site having been indexed only as domain.com these past twelve months, and all but one "significant" (PR 4 or higher) link pointing to the www-less domain.com.
Given that Google does see www.domain.com and domain.com as two sites, which is the lesser evil: Eliminating the archive function or adding yet another redirect directive?
Of possible interest to those who look for correlations between incoming links and PR on one hand and serps on the other: The www.domain.com serps consistenly rank higher than their domain.com counterparts, even though domain.com enjoys the benefit of more numerous and higher PR inbound links.
:)
Thank you. The fact is, however, that Google is and has been showing both in the serps--often one after the other, with the "www" version consistently ranking higher, oddly enough.
