Google: More 301 woes about www and no-www

deleted the 301 and now all pages are back.

[cleanup]

Yes thats right.

After nearly a year of waiting for Google to follow and correct the non-www via a 301 redirect, the only result I had seen was that ALL my pages disappeared from the index.

I waited and waited 10 months is a lot of money down the drain and all my advertisers lost.

So in desparation I deleted the 301 redirect two weeks ago, I figured that whatever happened it could not be any worse that having zero pages in the index.

Result.

The Bad news;
All the pages are back in the index under the non-www listing.

Good News,
All pages are ranking as they were before I tried the redirect and have their original page ranks etc.

So for the moment although far from happy that I can not list my pages in the Google index under www I will settle for having them under the non-www version if I can revive the site and get some traffic back that way.

Anyway just thought I would relay my experience as someone smarter than I may be able to make some sense of it all!

Cheers,
Cleanup

[edited by: cleanup at 7:17 pm (utc) on July 3, 2006]

[g1smd]

Add a <base href="http://www.domain.com/"> tag to just the index page and see if that helps any.

Make sure that every internal page of the site has a link back to http://www.domain.com/ too.

[zeus]

Stefan - I just checked again, no non www are pointing to my site, external or internal links, I dont have a 301 on the non www, but serious that should also not be nessesary, when nothing is pointing to that page, but why is the www. version not in the index it got all the links, 4 internal, 3 external, remember its a new site.

[alfred clarifies]

Hi,

I have few posts in this thread regarding my experience with 301.

5 days back i noticed a major change in my site indexing but before coming to it i would brief a little on the redirect in my iste.

The website is arould 8-10 yrs old and had all its pages are indexed in google without www.It had a 302 redirect from non www to www. 4-5 months back this 302 redirect was changed to 301 i.e 301 redirect from non www to www.

After the above chnage we found the toolbar PR showing zero. However when we checked the urls in an online PR checker by entering the non www url as a query we found the old PR in the generated result.

In the last 5 days we found that 70% of the site has been indexed with www i.e Google followed 301 well, but still the PR and the backlinks have not been transferred fro mnon www to www.

Apart from that there has been some serious PR fluctuations in few of the URLs of this site. Some of the internal urls which earlier had a PR of 3-4 are showing 0. However the positions and traffic has not been affected.Even the URLS that are showing PR 0 are ranking very well (in the top 5 results)

My questions are ;

1) Is this a passing phase? Will the page rank of all the internal pages be reinstated after a time period.

2) Even if i consider that the PR of the internal pages has dropped to zero then technically the home page should have also lost some PR as it is getting some PR share from these internal pages. Furthermore the URL should not have ranked within the top five results for very competetive keywords despite having a PR of 0.

Pls share u views on this. Your opinions and suggestions are invaluable

Thanks and regards

Alfred

[alfred clarifies]

This therad is an imp one. Pls share ur views on this.

[CainIV]

My thoughts:

Add a <base href="http://www.domain.com/"> tag to just the index page and see if that helps any.
Make sure that every internal page of the site has a link back to [domain.com...] too.

This is key, and every website I have that has had www /non www issues is now resolved by doing this as well as an htaccess from non to www (tested properly for each domain)

I have found these measures to be effective even though there are still non www links pointed as us. most of the 301 redirects were done in October of last year, but some were done in March of 2006 and seemed to have behaved properly.

However, I do know webmaster friends of mine who have done the same not ended up so lucky.

[alfred clarifies]

Hi Cain
Cud u pls specify the inportace of <base href="http://www.domain.com/">. How will it help us.

Thanks and regards,
Alfred

[g1smd]

It clarifies what the true URL of the index page really is.

That is exactly what you want when Google can't seem to decide whether it is www.domain.com/ or domain.com/.

[texasville]

I just ran keyword searches that I am interested in and checked the top ten listings in three categories. None of the top ten have 301 redirects, contain a base href or use domain.com/ (all use index.html as home).
Not wanting to start an argument or tell anybody what to do but wish others to check their keyword sectors and let us know what you find.

[ichthyous]

I recently changed servers and when they set up my account they used the non-www version of my URL. I have used www.mysite.com for years and have most of my links pointing to www.mysite.com. There is some URL redirect code in place in htaccess to rewrite all www requests to the non-www version. My pages are still indexed in Google with the www, with a few exceptions. However I have noticed two things: 1) when I updated my sitemap with Google sitemaps and removed the www I got an error message that my sitemap URLs need to have the www and 2) I have completely lost my page rank for my home page (4-->0) for the first time in 4 years. My interior pages still have some page rank, and in some cases it has gone up. Google reports the same incoming links to both versions of my site, and almost the same number of indexed pages as well. My questions are: 1) should I delete my current sitemap and add a new non-www site/sitemap or will that cause my pages to go supplemental again and 2) is the sudden reversal from www non-www the reason I lost my PR and 3) will that reduce my traffic? Thanks

[g1smd]

You are in a dangerous position.

Your links point to www then all requests are redirected to non-www. That is not good.

Get the direction of the redirect reversed as soon as possible. Make sure that the status code for the new one really is 301.

[ichthyous]

Hmm, not good. I had them make www.mysite.com the default again for my site and they added the 301 redirect code back in to my .htacces file. Here's how it looks:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} "!^www\.mysite\.com$"
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} "!^$"
RewriteRule (.*) [mysite.com...] [R=301,L]

I should have insisted from the beginning that they leave it alone. I don't think it will be a major problem though because my pages are all still indexed with the www and I submitted an updated sitemap with all URLS including www. I hope it's not long before my pagerank returns.