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Since the beginning of December we have been slipping down almost constantly and are now on page 3. Unsure what's happening and many new players have enetered the niche but I always though our back linkage was strong enough. But now when I examine our listing, I see:
domain.com/ - 42k - Cached - Similar pages
Compared to 99% of:
www.otherdomain.com/ - 26k - Cached - Similar pages
All our backlinks point to WWW and now it looks like the WWW isn't even listed. Why would this happen and what can I do to get Google to index WWW as it does for everyone else? Why are we special? Is it worth asking Google and would they even reply or look at it?
Been following the thread and am intrigued by exactly how folks are using .htaccess to redirect from not www to www versions of the domain.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and I've got very little knowledge on this so I guess that I'm very dangerous.
When I did a redesign of my site I changed the structure a bit which resulted in a couple of empty folders so I put this in my .htaccess file.
redirect permanent /emptyfolder/ [domain.com...]
I've also got this in there
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
ErrorDocument 301 /301.html
And the code to stop robots indexing urls with a query string.
My host has the server set up so that (notwww).domain.com just returns a cannot be found.
Have I got this set up right?
When you talk about slow death is this just for a couple of terms or for all of your secondaries as well?
Best wishes
Sid
I've removed my 301, I'm not even using a 302. not-www.mysite doesn't exist anymore. Once Google has is figured out I might reinstate the 301.
Is it worth asking Google and would they even reply or look at it?
That is what I would do. I have always found Google very good at correspondence. Other methods (via WW) might be a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
I have a sneaky suspicion that Google might be picking this up as well and considering it as spam as most sites hosted point to the same pages for the particular domain.
[edited]But I have to contradict my self on the above and say that most of our hosted sites with non-www & www headers, have only got the www record indexed in google/other SE's only!.[/edited]
This can be a worry to some ISP who may have several thoushand hosted sites with multiple domains with www/non-ww headers for each domain pointing to the same pages.
Thoughts and comments welcomed on this.
plumsauce
no, when it is a cname, google is confused
because the owner of the domain has clearly
defined one as an alias of the other. since
this is clearly specified in the dns response,
if they choose to ignore the information, then
it is they who are in the wrong.this should not be rocket science for the
much vaunted scientists at the plex.
Well said plum..
HNY 2004 y'all
logically, these all point to the index page of that directory but the Google Bots did not see it that way.
This was all due to anchor text from incoming links.
Then how to refrain google to index teh same page in the following three ways,
www.domain.com/Directory
www.domain.com/directory
www.domain.com/Directory/
As we cannot control the incoming links.
Have any negative effect for google to do in this way? Dup contents, then never cache the index page in this directory and never follow the links?
On non-US Google site I do a seach for my main keyword. I come up #6 with a fresh tag (feb2) but the listing does not have a link to my Google (DMOZ) directory listing and it is just listed as mydomain.com. I changed my title tag a few days ago and the new title is showing.
On the US Google site I do a search for my main keyword and I am towards the end of the second results page without a fresh tag, with a link to the Google (DMOZ) directory, and listed as www.mydomain.com.
Can anyone make sense of this?
www.domain.com/Directory
www.domain.com/directory
www.domain.com/Directory/
Hi,
Just for clarity are there three actual pages in the cache or are these links just appearing in the index.
The reason I ask is because I have some PPC URLs that point to a page which are in the index as links but there is no cached page or description just a link to similar pages under them.
I wonder if URLs are getting into the index without indexing of the page at the end of the link.
Best wishes
Sid
Directories and filenames in URLs are case sensitive.
> www.domain.com/Directory
www.domain.com/directory/
My provider set it up so that the former (document) gets redirected to the latter (directory). I don't know whether Apache or other servers handle this automatically.
I think that this whole with or without www stuff definately has something to do with the Austin update.
On non-US Google site I do a seach for my main keyword. I come up #6 with a fresh tag (feb2) but the listing does not have a link to my Google (DMOZ) directory listing and it is just listed as mydomain.com. I changed my title tag a few days ago and the new title is showing.On the US Google site I do a search for my main keyword and I am towards the end of the second results page without a fresh tag, with a link to the Google (DMOZ) directory, and listed as www.mydomain.com.
Can anyone make sense of this?
UPDATE: Everything is back to normal now, didn't make any changes, it just seemed to straighten itself out :)
Nick
