Forum Moderators: mack
I've had a site up for a little over a month now. It was built with frontpage and running on a shared server with Apache and Linux.
I was recently told that it's a huge no-no to allow both the www and non www versions of a site to be available. Unfortunately I just found this out. All my links point to the www version. Google has 52 pages indexed for the www version, and 75 for the non www version. Am I in trouble?
Is there some code I can add to every page that will re-direct my non www pages to the www version? Does it even matter? I emailed my host and they said it's automatically re-directed. Yeah right.
I've read everything I can find so far but am just becoming more and more confused!
Will doing a re-direct fix any harm that I've done? Is this even a big deal? I noticed one of my link partners who is PR5 does not re-direct and they seem to be doing just fine. But I did notice that the non www version is PR3. If they'd re-directed to the www version would their PR be higher?
If someone would be willing to provide some guidance I'd be eternally grateful. I'm worried that I've permanently hurt my site.
Boog
Also, do I need to manually subtract all the non www urls from Google? I think I read there's an option to do that somewhere.
Again, is this even a big deal, and does the fact that I've got different pages indexed for the www and non www version mean I'm going to be penalized with the search engines?
Thanks!
Boog
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!
Permanently? No.
Actually, you're lucky. Unlike most folks who discover this only years after putting up a site, you've discovered it before it's become much of a problem. Since all of your incoming links are correct, you've only got a tiny problem, and that is that you've got a few wrong-domain-name listings because Google hasn't yet figured out your "canonical" (that is, "customary and usual" or "correct") domain name.
Really, that's the main problem: Sites which resolve under multiple domain name variants depend on the search engines to "figure it out" using a post-processing routine. Sometimes, apparantly, that doesn't go well, and site pages end up listed under the "wrong" domain, or they end up with PageRank/Link Popularity split across multiple domains. This "dilutes" these ranking factors (usually slightly) and can affect search engine rankings (again, usually slightly). In your example (PR5 vs. PR3) correcting the domain would only improve things a little bit, because PR is a logarithmic measurement. No-one's sure exactly what the log base is, but a difference of two PR points might mean that the lower PR is only 1% of the higher, or maybe up to 10%.
The solution depends on what type of server you're hosted on, and what configuration-setting privileges you have on that server. The methods differ between Apache and MS IIS, for example.
Try a search on WebmasterWorld for "www non-www domain redirect [google.com]" and include your server type for more info.
Jim
[edited by: jdMorgan at 2:42 am (utc) on Sep. 12, 2005]
it's a huge no-no to allow both the www and non www versions of a site to be available
who told you this? I never heard that before. I'm quite happy letting people find me any way they want to.
I attempted to re-direct via cpanel. The re-directs worked if I viewed my site with Firefox, but not with the latest version of Explorer. I attempted to do a wildcard re-direct. I put [site.com...] re-direct to [site.com...] I was attempting to get all the pages to re-direct.
Now cpanel will not let me delete the re-direct. I click remove, it says it's deleted, but then it remains there! As of right now, no one using Explorer can view my site.
I don't suppose you'd know anything I could do to fix this?
Thanks!
