What more can I do?

after 301 and google map, still non-www

[seoamstel]

I own a 7 year old site, our traffic dropped drastically, after the www non-www problem. In june this year, we submited a google site map and implemented a 301 redirection from non-www to www, to solve the problem.

Now, when I search for site:mysite.com , google displays 50.000 results (all of them with www), but for site:www.mysite.com only 240 (all of them with www).

Well after 6 month, traffic is 10% of what it used to be.

What more can I do?
Thanks

[Stefan]

Perhaps you could try directing everything to the non-www version. That seems to be the one that G likes. Maybe that's the version that your highest PR backlinks are using?

[texasville]

It really has to do with what your backlinks are pointing to but most will include the www. Have you run a header check to determine if your 301 was done correctly?

[seoamstel]

Thanks for your help

"Perhaps you could try directing everything to the non-www version. That seems to be the one that G likes. Maybe that's the version that your highest PR backlinks are using?"

The problem it's that all inbound links point to the www version.

"Have you run a header check to determine if your 301 was done correctly?"

Excuse my ignorance, how do you do that?

[LunaC]

Search for "Check Server Headers" to find an online tool to show the header response. Then, in your case, type in your site without the www.

The results should show a 301, if its a 302 or something else there's a problem.

If you use Firefox, Live http headers extension is rather handy to.

[Dayo_UK]

seoamstel

You are not alone, Lots of us have been waiting a long time.....

MC has talked about a test DC (http://64.233.179.104) which should have improvements in this area - at the moment the test results are not being displayed - but keep an eye on over the next few weeks/months.

[MoveyourwebSEO]

Well, I had this problem.. I strongly recommend you to get rid of Google XML sitemap - this is really not useful and may be harmful. I had to make a 301 redirect, validated it - everything was ok, but my site hadn't a snippet and there was a canonical problem.
Then I removed a google sitemap and in a couple of days my non-www version was completely removed from the index and my homepage (with www) became fully indexed together with 30 other pages on the site.

I suppose that Google XML sitemap is not bringing any benefits at least at the moment... It is still a beta.

[seoamstel]

"Search for "Check Server Headers" to find an online tool to show the header response. Then, in your case, type in your site without the www.
The results should show a 301, if its a 302 or something else there's a problem.

If you use Firefox, Live http headers extension is rather handy to.

Thanks. done. 301 seems to be ok. (We use ISAPI rewrite)

"You are not alone, Lots of us have been waiting a long time.....

MC has talked about a test DC (http://64.233.179.104) which should have improvements in this area - at the moment the test results are not being displayed - but keep an eye on over the next few weeks/months. "

Still the same problem in that server

[seoamstel]

"I strongly recommend you to get rid of Google XML sitemap - this is really not useful and may be harmful"

do you really think so?, we had the problem before we implemented google sitemap.

[Dayo_UK]

I doubt that sitemap would cause problems.

Personally if you can I would wait to see how the test DC develops. One of the major purposes of the DC is to deal with this exact issue and MC said on his blog:-

"That data center has some infrastructure that I think in time will work better for canonicalization and redirects."

So I guess give it time before making any drastic changes.

[seoamstel]

Well, I've waited for more than 6 months!, I really nedd to find a solution :(

[pincher34]

I've had a 301 redirect in place for almost a year, and G still shows the non www pages. The non-www's are all supplementals...99% of the incoming links to my site use the www.

I created an XML sitemap for the www version and that made no difference. I also setup G Sitemaps for the non-www version (but didn't add an actual sitemap for it), and found that it is still trying to spider pages from non-www. It doesn't seem to be updating its index, because the cache dates for the non-www's are still Jan 05.

Edited for clarity.

[seoamstel]

So pincher34, I understand that you have the same problem than me, right?

[pincher34]

Yes, that's right.

And I might add that my site is 4 years old.

[seoamstel]

Hi again,

Well, google is displaying very weird results of my site when you search for some keywords, as follows:

The requested resource was moved. It could be found here: http ...The requested resource was moved. It could be found here: [mysite.com...]

mysite.com/mypage.htm - 1k

Do you have any explanation? Do you think my 301 rederiction is not properly configured?

[youngkeen]

I have exactly the same problem, I believe it might have something to do with google sitemap as thats when my problems started. Someone mensioned they got rid of the xml sitemap did that help?
I have direected all internal links as absolutes with www,
I have also done my .htaccess file to redirect non-www to www.
and i am still having no luck my pages are in google as example.com/index.html but are all supplemental i have 5 www.example...... pages that are not supplemental in google someone please give me some advice.
Youngkeen

[MoveyourwebSEO]

Yes, after removing Google Sitemap XML and implementing <base href="http://www.mysite.com"> the site got rid of non-www results and googlebot started spidering the pages more often and quicker. That's the point.

[seoamstel]

How do you implement a base href? And.., excuse my ignorance what's a base href?

[tedster]

It's a tag you add to the head of each page. Format:

<base href="[this page's exact, absolute url]">

This tells the user agent to interperet all relative urls on the page "relative to" the url in the tag.

[theBear]

tedster I think there is a mismatch between his server settings and the redirect itself.

I've asked for the domain so I can take a look.

[seoamstel]

Thank you,

I've sent you a pm

[theBear]

Just so the thread readers know his server setup is fine as is his redirect.

He however has some issues with the old pages still being in the index and a few other duplicate content type problems.

Those messages about has moved were from July, at that time something wasn't quite correct.

[seoamstel]

Thank you again,

I wouldn't like to abuse your patience, so just my last question, do you reccommend us to do something or just wait and see?

[tmoney]

Below is the message from our webmaster, can anyone tell me if this is the same problem you all have been discussing and if we are going in the right direction or should we reverse the redirect that we just implemented?

With the cloud surrounding duplicate content, and our desire to have a clean site (from a user experience and SEO perspective), we may have made the wrong move. We have a site that makes extensive use of subdomains (ie. subdomain.domain.com), thus we would consider our root (main homepage) to be domain.com (not www.domain.com). We recently created an .htaccess file that permanently forwards all calls to www.domain.com to domain.com via a 301 header. We are worried because our domain.com has a PR 2, and www.domain.com had a PR 5. Did we just kill our site? We are not trying to do anything tricky or otherwise, but the change was made because we thought we would be in worse trouble by allowing two different pages with the exact same content (www.domain.com and domain.com).

[Steph_R]

Great questions. I look forward to others' opinions regarding the last two posts.