Same site, but different PR with or without the WWW!?

Can this be explained?

[ideavirus]

Hello,

[mydomain.com...] has a PR4 but
[mydomain.com...] has a PR5 ..!

Is that possible? earlier [mydomain.com...] didn't have any PR at all.

Okay, what i have observed is that, [mydomain.com...] had no PR before my site got included in DMOZ, but after inclusion, it has PR4, but [mydomain.com...] got no PR boost as such!

Anyone having same similiar situations with their sites?

Thanks for your input!

Cheers

[rfgdxm1]

Because these are NOT the same site. Only because you happen to have configured the server that these point to the same thing is this the case. It is quite easy to put a porn site at [mydomain.com...] and a site about basketweaving at [mydomain.com...] if you want.

[ideavirus]

I understand what you have to say. Does that mean GoogleBot considers with and without WWW as two different sites?!

Also, what I am wondering is, my listing in DMOZ is with www.mydomain.com, but i have got a boost for [mydomain.com!...] This is what really confuses me?

Thanks again
Cheers

[brotherhood of LAN]

I can relate to it ideavirus....

I have 4 listings in DMOZ for a site, but with each Google update the category under my home page SERP is "category A", while next month it is "category B".

category A is mydomain.com while B is www.mydomain.com

On the month that category A is under my SERP, I get listed as two seperate sites for a particular search.

Whatever the effects are, part of the influence seems to be DMOZ or PR....

I was thinking that maybe if googlebot spiders your page following a link from domain.com > then > you change the page and it comes from another links as www.domain.com then maybe that's why G bot would make a distinct difference between the pages, otherwise if they match on both spiders they are the same page (?)

[bill]

This has been going on for some time now. Check out this thread: Google now treats Domain.com and www.Domain.com as Different Sites? [webmasterworld.com] You might want to consider a solution like Chico_Loco suggests in message #7.

[martinibuster]

The moral of this story is to be careful of how you format your link submissions before you hit the "submit" button.

Otherwise you are wasting your pagerank and wasting your time.

In case this needs explaining:

You end up having your pr wasted between domain.com and www.domain.com. It's better to have one stream of PR. This can make the difference between being a pr4 and a pr 5 site.

[rfgdxm1]

>I understand what you have to say. Does that mean GoogleBot considers with and without WWW as two different sites?!

Of course, because these ARE 2 separate sites! Common practice is that most people point both at the same data, BUT THIS DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THE CASE. Google has to allow for the case where there is different content at www.domain.com and domain.com. While Google will merge these in the SERPs, you can lose PR if all links aren't to one or the other.

[ciml]

rfgdxm1:
> While Google will merge these in the SERPs, you can lose PR if all links aren't to one or the other.

If Google merges the URLs in the SERPs, then the PR to both URLs does count towards whichever URL is included. As Brotherhood points out, if the content changes between the times that the two URLs are fetched then they probably won't be merged and the PR will be split.

In my opinion, it makes more sense for one URL to issue an HTTP (external) redirect to the other, preferably status 301.

[jomaxx]

I just looked at about a dozen sites, and the www and the non-www versions ALL had the same PR. Even, to address ciml's suggestion, frequently-updated news sites. I've never observed this effect ever. It looks to me like the norm is for both URL's to have the same PR.

I don't mean to sound skeptical of the people reporting this issue, but can anyone provide a specific example of the "www." making a difference?

[Macguru]

Sorry jomaxx,

We avoid to post any specific examples on this board.

Most domain.com redirects to www.domain.com. Did you make sure the PR you check for similar domains is still the same in the adress bar?

I see a truck load of different PR for the same domain, without the need of anything specific.

[bcc1234]

Since you cannot control how people link to you (with or without www) - configure your http server to do a permanent redirect from non-www urls to www.

[jomaxx]

Yes of course I checked that.

[Macguru]

Well, maybe a few dozens is far from a truckload. Try att.com

[jomaxx]

Thanks for the example, but by pinging the sites I notice that att.com and www.att.com point to 2 different IP addresses.

I should have said I wanted an example where the www and the non-www addresses are treated identically by the server, and yet have different PR's.

[Macguru]

>>pinging the sites I notice that att.com and www.att.com point to 2 different IP addresses.

I am no expert at servers. Can anyone point me to a system that can redirect to the same IP?

[bcc1234]

I am no expert at servers. Can anyone point me to a system that can redirect to the same IP?

What do you mean?

[Macguru]

Lets say IP is 111.111.111.111 for domain.com, can some kind of system point to www.domain.com still using the 111.111.111.111 IP?

[Slade]

Yes, you can.

That's kind of what virtual hosting is... I have 4 sites all on the same IP.

There's nothing sacred about "www." It could be anything. On one domain, I have mailc., test., www., and a few more I can't remember that all point to the same IP. Apache makes my domain.com and www.domain.com the same site, but the rest are different(like someone mentioned above).

[jomaxx]

I was just making the point that att.com and www.att.com are not the same site. In fact, the former has a redirect to a raw IP number.

Many sites, possibly most sites on the Net, are configured to allow interchangeable www and non-www addressing of webpages (drudgereport.com is one example). These should AFAIK always resolve to the same IP.

From my limited testing it appeared that Google does indeed roll up www and non-www PR into one number. I was looking for any example of this kind of website which has 2 different PR's.

[bcc1234]

They can resolve to the same or different ip's. There is nothing about it in dns specs.

[Macguru]

So, we can have different sites on the same IP showing different PR, the same site on different IPs showing the same PR.

So I guess Google dont care about IP's, right?

I guess the trick is on how to redirect, right?

Can anyone shed a light for non techie?

( I certainly miss the site search to dig all that up. I used to survive by just asking the server guy to do a 301 redirect. )

[bcc1234]

From what I read, google does not care for ip (i think googleguy stressed that point a few times).

Also, I'm sure it's possible to get a site indexed by it's ip if you have links pointing to it, but that ip is going to be considered a url.

Having multiple ip addresses with one domain should not affect it's pr. That would not make sense.