Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
For sites that had been dual-listed for a while, and had then put the redirect in place some 18 months ago, their listings are now much tidier. All of their www pages are fully listed.
The non-www pages have mainly dropped out (those with 2004 and early-2005 cache dates), but a few with cache dates any time after 2005 June still remain here and there.
That isn't a problem, because the on-site 301 redirect takes the user to the correct www page should any of the non-www results appear in the SERPs and get clicked on.
I'd say, add the redirect; and if you already have one in place, then keep it.
Make sure too that all internal pages link back to http://www.domain.com/ in that format.
Make sure that there are no internal links pointing to any non-www URLs.
A <base href="http://www.domain.com/"> tag on the root index page could help too.
If your site has never had a duplicate page or supplementary result problem, then your site may be alright - so far. But trouble could start tomorrow.
On the other hand, I have never heard of site suffering from having a correctly applied 301 from non-www to www; and I know of many who have benefited.
Why take the risk? What possible advantage could there be - and why throw away the chance to consolidate all your page rankings into one set of URLs, rather than divide them between two?
If you believe you will get 'more pages in the serps' - that's conceivable. But they will be lower in the serps, as your rankings will be split (unevenly) between two URLs.
[edited by: Quadrille at 9:51 pm (utc) on July 26, 2006]
I don't see that happening. I see one version carrying pr and the other none.
And I am not seeing the version in the serps. I look at the top ten in any given search and look for myself. They each have both versions. www and non-www.
Try it for yourself. There may be one exception in the top ten but 90% or better in each of my searches do NOT have a 301 redirect.
More to the point though, about 99.999999% of sites that have troubles do not or did not have 301s in place when they developed their problem. It's suicide to not have a 301 in place now, especially since there is no reason not to. It's just about the one no brainer positive thing you can do to protect yourself. Of course, adding one now may not help you for literally two years or more, until Google purges duplicates.
As for the argument that not having one doesn't hurt some sites, why risk being one of the ten or fifteen or five or twenty percent of sites that have been hurt? It makes no sense. There is no reason not to do one so why on earth would you intentionally serve duplicate content?
(The two year comment related to a guess as to how long Google will keep a duplicate in its supplemental index.)
Any link to domain.com is a link denied to www.domain.com; and the same applies to all links, all pages.
For some sites, months dow the line, domain.com may show a GPR=5, say, while www.domain.com may be showing GPR=3.
Or one may show 6, and one "0" - just because the damage is not reflected in the little green bar, does not mean that damage is not occuring. The green bar is quite good at showing gross problems; useless at small but growing ones.
Ignore the toolbar and do the math. If you have - in Google's eyes - two domains, then you are dividing your ranking (though not necessarily your GPR).
site:domain.com
site:domain.com -inurl:www
site:domain.com inul:www
site:www.domain.com
site:www.domain.com -inurl:www
site:www.domain.com inurl:www
There are extra searches in that list, compared to normal, as Google seems to have a problem with the inurl operator at the moment.
I have seen several sites that have been listed only as www for several years, and who do not have the redirect from non-www to www in place, suddenly start appearing with both www and non-www pages in the index. This has happened in just the last few weeks.
This describes what happened to me on Saturday. Its been a 302 since 1998 and has sat at the top of serps since before Florida without moving more than one position.
3-4 weeks ago I noticed the non-www was showing PR1 and one backlink; quite different than the www version which it has always matched. The serps were unchangedthough until Saturday. I fell from #1 and #2 for my two main queries to out of the top 100. For my 3rd most important search, I dropped from #1 to #5, where Google now shows the non-www page.
I have since implemented the 301, but who knows how long it'll take Google to fix this.
My main competitor suffered the same fate and I have seen this with several other high ranking, 7+ year old sites as well. While I am watching others that havent yet been affected, I wouldnt play this game of russian roulette again.
[edited by: Kirby at 3:13 pm (utc) on July 27, 2006]
On the other hand, I have never heard of site suffering from having a correctly applied 301 from non-www to www; and I know of many who have benefited.
I lost 70-90% of my Google referrals over a two-month period from late March to late May, 2005, and Google showed a ton of duplicate www and non-www listings.
At the suggestion of Lammert and Dazzlindona, I put a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file (www to non-www, since non-www is my default), and two things happened within seven or eight weeks:
- My Google rankings jumped back to where they'd been before the disaster, and my Google referrals returned.
- Link:sitename.com and link:www.sitename.com showed the same number of inbound links for the first time (which may have given my pages with inbound links a slight boost in PageRank; if so, that was a bonus).
I'm firmly convinced that 301 redirects to avoid duplicate listings is good insurance. Here's what I've got in my .htaccess file on an Apache server (ignore the hotlinks inserted by WW's forum software):
Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond ${HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.sitename\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [sitename.com...] [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.shtml
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.shtml$ [sitename.com...] [R=301,L]
As you have it now, a request for www/index is redirected to non-www/index and then redirected onwards to non-www/.
Wouldn't it be better for all redirects to be just one hop?
last sunday ammended the htaccess file to include the 301 redirect.
at this point we had 25,000 pages indexed on tuesday checked the page via a tool and index had dropped to 5000 pages, and todaty i checked the stats again and it dropped to 537 pages.
now the question begs to be answered what are we supposed to do take this canonical issue seriously and lose serious revenue.
or drop the 301
i have dropped it because i can not afford to be sat in our ofice twidling my thumbs we ahve operated on the net for 6 years with no major problem.
then google comes up with this canonical farce.
why dont they jusy fax the algo.
Any way what should i do now reincorporate the 301 or see what happens.
