non-www home page is supplemental - what to do?

[optimist]

What do you do when a non-www homepage is supplemental?

[tedster]

Do you mean the "with-www" version is listed healthily? Then I would just 301 redirect all the "no-www" requests to the "with-www" version and scour the site to change any links that don't have the www. The no-www version may stay in the Supplemental index for a long time, but that will not be harmful, in itself.

[steveb]

It can be very harmful, but there isn't anything you can do. 301 it anyway though of course.

[wildegray]

Okay, now I'm curious-- is it or isn't it harmful, and why?

[steveb]

I don't know of any site where this phenomenon exists where rankings have not suffered.

As to why, well that's just philosophy, but look at what appears to be the original target of the supplemental index: garbage/scraped/duplicate pages. You want that stapled on the front of (any version) of your main page?

[wanderingmind]

It may and may not be harmful for rankings.

I have seen seen it both ways.

[optimist]

It is harmful!

The cache date on the supplemental is Jan 2005.

Has anyone ever snapped back from this or reolved this?

[Dayo_UK]

>>>>I don't know of any site where this phenomenon exists where rankings have not suffered.

Indeed - me neither.

>>>>Has anyone ever snapped back from this or reolved this?

Yes, although it seems to be luck of the draw. There does not seem to be a general fix.

301 the non-www to the www and you may get lucky.

[seochristine]

U hardly do.:(
Recently I had one of my clients pages 310'd,
the home page was ok with proper redirection from the very start.
But all the subsectional pages were not, and existed both with "www" and without it in G's index.
Now with a proper 301 permanent redirection, all the pages have lost their PR, from PR5, PR6 to PR0.
It has been a long time now. The redirection is proper, but the G index still holds back those old url's without the "www"'s.

[optimist]

That's easy if its internal, just rename the URLs, if they are already lost then the age doesn't matter, change your navigation and 301 redirect the old pages, if possible get a few links to the new pages and the PR sould go up on hose internal pages on the next PR update.

The issue here seems to be on the Home Page only, the non-www homepage is supplemental, and the www. home page is fine, it has been like this for over a year, and the time assumption is solely based ont the Google cache of Jan 2005, however the sites rankings weren't noticed lost till around Jagger, so no one ever noticed the non-www. It has been 301'd since Oct, with no pickup in rankings, only downward shifts. Although Google Sitemaps claims the site ranks for terms it does not appear on from a manual search, some are there some aren't.

It holds some top 20 rankings for very competitive terms, those are drops, but the really non-competitive terms and regional terms are all gone. Its hard to be 100% sure that the non-www is the reason and not Jagger.

[g1smd]

Make sure that NO internal links point to non-www URLs.

Use Xenu LinkSleuth to check the internal linking too.

[MissusC]

The problem is competitors still point to the non www version of my site and it does have a cache date of January 2005 for many of my non www supplemental pages. AND I have been trying to dig this site out of the Google abyss for over a year!

Any help appreciated...

[g1smd]

It is the internal linking that is most important. If you are linking to non-www pages from within the site, then that will confuse Google. Make sure that you link only to www pages.

The base tag may help here too, putting <base href="http://www.domain.com/"> on all pages, but your internal links must then all start with a / OR include the full domain.

[newwebster]

Once the page is in the supplemental index it is no longer your property. This is Google doing the utlimate hijack of your page. I have had a 301 site wide redirect in place since May of last year and had no problems prior to Jagger. Once Jagger hit, and they dumped a new pile of supplementals into the index I noticed a non www version of my index page appearing like a cancer. At some point in Jan of 05, Google decided to do some archiving and unfortunately one of those was my index page listed as a supplemental with the url of [site.com...] with a cache of Jan 05.

During Jagger my rankings plummeted then regained partial ranking in Dec, then dropped once again in early Feb. I have not recovered from the Feb. downturn as of yet and have been sliding even further down.

There is a specific search that I can do that should bring up my index page as the #1 result. The supplemental version is #1 and the current correct www version is listed at #10. Both version are appearing for the same search with the supplemental ranking higher. That should not be happening.

I am trying to be patient as possible with the new infrastructure in place and all that is needed to fix issues. It is very difficult though to accept the timeframe as how long this might take to fix. Until that supplemental page is really deleted (not hidden), I do not know what to do but wait.

I also do not get fresh tags anymore. I have not seen a fresh tag next to my listings since October of last year. Before Jagger, I got fresh tags all of the time.

Matt Cutts indicated at the end of March that a Supplemental "refresh" would occur near term. Has anybody seen anything to indicate that this has taken place? He also indicated back in Jan that any page that is supplemental that is 301 would be removed the next time the supplemental bot came around.

I have not seen any of this take place yet and do wish that they would get to it.

[g1smd]

I am of the opinion that this "Supplemental Googlebot" is yet to even make its first run, and in fact is still in the design stages.

It was suddenly mentioned a few months ago (by Matt Cutts or GoogleGuy), but when previously chatting on similar topics, it not been mentioned at all.

At the moment I am guessing that it is vapourware.