Cannonical problem

Should I bother contacting Google?

[Kangol]

I have a canonical problem on my site. For site:domain.ltd, Google is displaying only my home page without www. and the rest of the pages normal.

I noticed this problem about one 10 days ago. I have a 301 redirect in my .htaccess for 6 months, I also have a site map where all the pages are added right.

Is there something else I can do? Nothing seems to work, the sitemaps seems to be a useless tool. Should I bother to contact Google on this problem?

Thanx.

[Quadrille]

Check the 301 for yourself; be sure it is working.

Check your internal site navigation, too.

[Kangol]

The 301 works, there are no internal links that point to domain.ltd...

[Kangol]

Do not know if it counts or its just a bug but the PR (5) for www.domain.ltd disappeared. Its still there for other pages.

[Quadrille]

Does the page change often (ie the whole or most of it); or is it short on text and dominated by images, js, iframes or flash?

What URL do you use to link from internal pages to the homepage? HTML, js or both?

Is the site listed in a few quality diirectories, if so, what URL do they (usually) use? eg domain.com, domain.com/index.html etc

[Komodo_Tale]

Because there are billions and billions of web pages out there, Google and other search engines simply do not have the time to manually fix canonical problems.

Your best bet is to do the following three things:

1) Put this in your .htaccess

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.comain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Example:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^webmasterworld\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webmasterworld.com/$1 [L,R=301]

2) Change all the internal links on your website from relative to absolute using the www prefix.

Example:

Change <a href='../monkey/ectoplasam.html'>
to <a href='http://www.webmasterworld/monkey/ectoplasam.html'>

3) Contact all you link buddies and ask them to change your non-www links to www-links.

Here is a reality check. It may be easier to skip #3 and just work on generating new links to your www-prefixed domain.

[Kangol]

The page is not heavily updated. It have about 400 words, few images, no js or hlash.
MSN shows about 700 backlinks with lots of scapers links.

"What URL do you use to link from internal pages to the homepage? HTML, js or both?"

I expecially used 2 years ago when I've made it only HTML links pointing directly to www.domain.ltd. Also the external links point to www.domain.ltd.

[Kangol]

I use absolute links and this is in my htaccess for about 6 months:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.domain\.ltd [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [domain.ltd...] [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

As I've sad this problem is for about 10 days. I think that have something to do with the latest Google changes.

[RichTC]

Interesting points

I noticed that a good number of sites lised in google still have cannonical problems

For example, one page on one of our sites for the search term "Blue widgets" ranks position 14 as a PR5 page with the www. prefix (cashed a few days ago)

Meanwhile a search for "blueish widjot" the same page of the site is returned by Google in its index at about 23 without the www. prefix. (The page cashed 22nd Jan)

The site has had a permanent 301 for 6 months now.

listed with and without the www. prefix