Rankings - Prefix www vs. non-prefix

Old site, good ranking/popularity

[brass monkey]

Hi all,

I have come across an issue with one of my sites and was not really sure how to react. Now I know that PageRank is not the ultimate tool for popularity, but it can be a guide. My concern is as follows:

I have a site that has been out for many years with a PR 4 and captures a lot of top rankings under its keywords. However, whenever you go to any sub pages, they all are PR 0 (pages have been out there for years and are spiderable). No alarm here, as the sub pages show up in the rankings as well. These are all pages using the prefix www.

Now, when I remove the prefix www and just do [domain.com,...] I have the home page with a PR 4 and all sub pages have rankings (4s and 3s). However, none of the non-prefix pages show up in the rankings. Now, this is a bit confusing...

Are the non-prefix pages being spidered and index since they have a completely different PageRank than the prefix pages? Anyone have any similar experiences?

I am just trying to determine if there is a cause for alarm...

Thanks,

Brass

[g1smd]

This question comes up every couple of days, and the topic is important to the well-being of a site.

You are serving "duplicate content". You need a "301 redirect" to set the "canonical URL" for each page.

Matt Cutts and many others have written tens of thousands of words on those subjects in the last 2 or 3 years.

[Quadrille]

Yes.

Choose www or non-www; most go for www but it is consistency that matters

In future, (assuming you chose www) get all incoming links directed to www.domain.com - do not use index.html

All internal links should go to / or [domain.com...]

Be *sure* the forwarding is a 301 forward.

Basically, Google sees you as owning two sites with cloned copy - and Google is allergic to duplication.

The good news is that you have discovered the one positive use for toolbar GPR - diagnosing the "301 error"

[edited by: Quadrille at 7:19 am (utc) on July 15, 2006]