www. issue

[Buzliteyear]

Okay, from reading here and checking my site, I discovered that I have a big site problem.

About half my pages use www. while the other half do not. Using Google site check, I discovered the following:

site:www.mysite.com 382 listed
site:mysite.com 263 listed

I think this may be hurting my pagerank too.

So, I ask, is this a problem? Should I change all to www.?

Any potential problems if I do make this change?

Thanks.

[tedster]

Something is very odd about that. Yes, when a site is "split" you can often get better results by chosing one or the other and being consistent (and 301 redirecting one version to the other). That is, after some indefinite period of adjustment in the Google back end, during which things may look worse for a bit.

But in my experience, the site:example.com will also include any with-www urls. Why your results would be lower for the no-www query is a mystery to me, unless you got switched to a different data center between the two queries. Are those results consistent?

[NJLawman]

Yes, the results are the same.

I've been breaking my but with a link building program, and I don't seem to be getting anywhere. Plus, I'm only making small bumps in improving my SE results.

Then, I found this.

[NJLawman]

Oops. Reverse those two numbers. I wrote them down backwards.

[g1smd]

Yes. Install a 301 redirect for all pages of the site. This goes in the .htaccess file.

The code is mentioned at least once per week somewhere in the forum...

[google.com...]