Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This is very confusing to me.
Help clear it up for me please.
Does anyone know if link popularity gets split when the same url is indexed twice, once with www and once without www, and in-bound links are directed to both versions? Or are the algorithms smart enough to associate the two URLs together?
The problem occurs because Google first of all just gets a link (url) inserts it in its database without any regard to anything other than it was in an href or image src somewhere sometime.
So if you were to make up a name any name Google will at some point create an entry for it somewhere.
The other problems start when the DNS system gets tapped then the server comes into play.
If Google sees a 200 at the end of the chain watch out the content gets stored under the url google hit the server with.
Any mistookes along the way just adds spice to the soup.
Google will have indexed your content under both www and non-www. The non-www was quickly dropped out of the index as a duplicate, but Google still kept an old cache copy of the page. After you amended the www version of the page again, the old copy of non-www that Google had kept is no longer seen as being a duplicate of the live www page and so it reappears in the SERPs as a supplemental result.
Getting rid of it is almost impossible.
The 301 redirect will help a lot.
