Forum Moderators: mack
Currently I have a pagerank 2 for my site when it is accesed either via domain.com or www.domain.com. After reading for a while I saw that many people are saying there should be a redirect in place, because pagerank will get split between the "www" version and the non "www" one.
Well after setting up the redirect (through CPanel) no matter what I typed I was taken to www.domain.com/index.php, which has no pagerank. Also I tried doing the redirect by editing .htaccess, but nothing happened.
Should I just leave the site as is?
Is my pagerank split between the 2 versions?
What type of redirect should I use, temporary or permanent?
As a side note: this is my first site, it has been online for only 2 months and I know almost nothing on the technical side.
Thank you for your attention!
To answer you...
SEs recognize "WWW" and "no-WWW" versions as separate "entities",so they assign PR to each one.
Redirect is uneffective because they are the same url address.
You can only entrust the version you want by getting inbound links on it and leaving alone the other one.
Keep in mind that the effects of these modifies are not immediate.PR is updated 2/3 times in a year.
Hope to be helpful
Bye
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) [example.com...] [R=301,L]
Permanent redirect for sure, and also I'd suggest changing all the in-site links to the homepage to [example.com...] without any file name and make it a standard practice to do it that way.
And BTW, yes! I have at times redirected a site to www.example.com and had to change it. :)
Specter, all my incoming links are for the "www" version, but I found it odd that both versions have PR 2.
Marcia, thanks for the .htaccess mini tutorial, I'll apply it when I have the time for testing. Also, all my links point to the "www" version.
Thank you again!
I have a site with a PR2 without WWW, and PR4 with WWW. The average is 3. The total PR value would seem to be the same as just having one indexed with a PR3 since the average PR is 3, but still likely better overall.
IMO you are better off having it listed both ways and try to achieve a PR on both, even if one PR is 0 (and white - as long as the G PR0 is not greyed out) it still has some value from what I can see.
When you do SEO work it's a good idea to try and get it ranked both ways since searchers are more likely to find your site if indexed by G both ways.
When you do SEO work it's a good idea to try and get it ranked both ways since searchers are more likely to find your site if indexed by G both ways.
I do believe Google will merge the two together after seeing that they are the same content. What I've seen happen is the one with the most incoming links will be the one to stay in the index. It is strongly suggested that you permanently redirect the one not being used to the one being used.
Keep in mind that www.example.com is a subdomain of example.com. You could have two totally different sites at each address.
PageRank for public consumption is inaccurate. The Toolbar PR has been erratic for over a year now. And, depending on which version of the Toolbar you are using, you may see different PR.
I have set up the redirect to the www version, all the incoming links are to the "www" ver. as are the in-site ones.
Pageoneresults, I have seen that the Googlebar isn't the most accurate of tools so I only take a look at PR once in a while (I'm more interested in the SERP's :) ).
Also, I don't like Internet Explorer at all so I use a small plug-in for Firefox called "SearchStatus". It shows PR and Alexa Rank and is really unobstrusive.
