Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Thanks for your time in advance.
J
if so, google sees these as two different sites, but only if you have it set up that way on your end.
anybody else?
I have been using the link: tool in google to find out how many sites are linking to me,
Bad idea. Google's "link:" search is useless as a tool for tracking incoming links. It shows only a small sample of the links that Google actually knows about and uses in its PageRank calculations. Google has deliberately crippled it to make it more difficult for site owners to "game" the algorithms.
Based on my experience, this could mean that Google is seeing whatever.com and www.whatever.com as separate sites. This could lead to duplicate-content problems down the road, unless you place a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file to redirect non-www URLs to the www versions (or vice versa, if your preference is not to use the "www").
Here's code that should work in .htaccess (assuming that you have an Apache server) to redirect non-www URLs to www:
Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond ${HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sitename\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [sitename.com...] [R=301,L]
rewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.shtml
rewriteRule ^(.*)index\.shtml$ [sitename.com...] [R=301,L]
(Ignore the underlining in the code above; the Webmaster World forum software added that.)
You'll find variations on this if you look at past threads on the "canonical" topic here and in the Apache forum.
Caution: Before editing your .htaccess file, be sure that you have a backup copy of the existing version saved where you won't mess it up by mistake (just in case you make a typo or things don't work as planned).
And a disclaimer: I'm not an Apache expert; the above code was culled from past threads on the www vs. non-www topic. If you have any questions, you'll need to ask someone who's more Apache-literate than I am.
If you search on "link: www.example.com" (with a space), Google performs an ordinary text search and gives you pages that contain the words "link" and "www.example.com" somewhere in the visible text on the page. Of course, if "www.example.com" appears as visible text on a page, it is often the anchor text of a link to www.example.com, but not necessarily. Simply mentioning a domain name is not the same as linking to it.
the best links are ones from sites that themselves rank well, and in particular gov/edu sites are gold if you can get them.
ie, if you sell widgets to a university - try to get the university to link to your site from a page on their sitethat discusses those widgets.
sound tricky - it is!
Please forgive my naivity, but what the hell are widgets?
"Widget" is a generic nickname for "things" or "objects" (kind of like "stuff").
Investorwords.com defines "widget" as "a hypothetical product used to illustrate a business concept."
Addendum: Once you've implemented the redirect, it may take a month or two until you see identical numbers for link:www.whatever.com and link:whatever.com.
