Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
grasp what, if any, effect a 'canonical' or 'supplemental' issue might be having on their rankings.
Right Patrick - I think many brains here are overloaded - mine sure is - but here are some of my observations. I should wait until Jagger 3 is done but...
* IMHO Canonical confusion is rare, but when it happens your site may be screwed until you fix it. GoogleGuy and the engineers and support have all said many times to "use 301 redirection" to resolve canonical issues.
If a site DOES NOT HAVE canonical issues I'm not sure I'd advise changes because .htaccess is powerful and can kill off listings if misapplied.
* IHMO Supplementals are very deadly. I'm very upset with Google guidelines because I think they are very misleading about supplementals by implying it's just a way to help find obscure content rather than an effective penalty on sites and/or pages.
I now think supplementals are Google's kiss of death to pages that Google determined to have "too much" non-relevant, redundant, or duplicate info.
I now think Google kills many excellent pages indirectly due to misinterpreting 302 and 301 redirection and allowing a lot of scraped content into the index, and I think this is still a major problem at Google.
I'd hoped Jagger was going to help resolve the many problems with this stuff but I'm not optimistic.
I'm wildly guessing that Jagger will prevent future problems but won't fix the collateral damage from the past years.
site:www.domain.com www.domain.com
throws up dozens of pages that no longer exist on the site and have cache dates going back to 2004 and may or may not be listed as supplemental, or a search for
site:domain.com -www
throws up pages with no www, including domain.com and other supplementals.
It's hard to know if this sort of thing is affecting the ranking of pages on a site (when all the right pages are actually indexed and are receiving some referrals), and of concern if the good pages might be suffering even after the redirect is in place, and the feeling is that this historical junk will never be removed by Google.
If you have seen no major change in the number of Google referrals I'd assume you have no problem. Big change in referrals = problem.
Older pages (2004) seem unaffected.
GoogleGuy is our kind fellow member and he is an employee at Google.Matt Cutts is the head of WebSpam Team at Google.
Well at least you know their job is to take your job and make it miserable....
What I don't understand is why you guys are helping them do it.
basting sauces for duck and other meat dishes
Quack....HATE those weesults Abigail. It's an anti-duck google conspiracy.
Linkjack - what are you talking about? Spam is not my business, content is. I see interacting with Google as a good way to help them fight spam and introduce better results. I hope they are MY results but you can't win them all. I do wish they had a LOT better system for site evaluation if that's what you mean, but you make it seem like it's "us vs them" where we are spamming and they are fighting us.
What do you see as the job of webmasters?
Only very slight flux but since the start of Jagger they had been absolutely static for the first time literally in years.
Technical question: is the no need for a backslash in front of .com?
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
I've personally never heard of:
www.domain\.com
Out of the 44 DC's listed, 12 now use 66.102.7.104 results and 4 are using 66.102.9.104/66.102.11.104
Probably useless info since many are test servers and such...but thought it might be of interest to some...
JO
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
DC 66.102.7.104 seems to be oscillating badly recently. Sometimes my site appears at #4, sometimes above #1,000 (if at all). This seems to be a pretty broad range. I hope the end result is #4 and not an average of the two!
Next week we can hopefully buy the "I survived Jagger3 T-Shirts" ... or not.
Next week we can hopefully buy the "I survived Jagger3 T-Shirts" ... or not.and the shiny new Pacemaker!
If you haven't yet added the 301 redirect that GoogleGuy has urged people to add to their sites for at least the last 6 months, then now really is a very good time to get it done.
[If you haven't yet added the 301 redirect that GoogleGuy has urged people to add to their sites for at least the last 6 months, then now really is a very good time to get it done.]
A pacemaker? From some of the remarks on here how about a defibrillator, iron lung, new liver and kidneys.
YMMV,IANASEO, and MOIM
JO
Stuff it in your .htaccess file at the root of your site. It redirects for every page.
We spoke to our hosting service, and they did something to fix this so that "example.com" does not resolve into or mirror or duplicate "www.example.com" in any way at all.
When I asked, they replied with "We've removed the 'A' records". Sure enough, typing in "oursite.com" now no longer connects.
One question: What are "A" records?
So, there's an alternate method. Or is it?
Comments?
JO
I would definately due the htaccess change instead.
It is the first thing I do when I start working on any site.
having the host eliminate it in the A records may foul things up for your rankings in Google because it may think you do not exist anymore
If you have any pages at non-www already indexed by Google, then you really do need to let Google see the redirect...I hear you.
There are only two sites (out of several thousand) that I can find that link to us without the www.
If Google tries that link, it'll just find "bad" link, not a missing duplicate site. Surely they can handle the 5% of all links that are typos or bad!
I will discuss this with our host service...
I am telling you from experience....use the 301's and let Google figure it out...or you might be pulling your hair out for months to come...an ounce of prevention here on this issue is worth about 2 tons .... Really, just trust us here as I am sure the other guys are speaking from experience as well...so to recap the rules to follow are below...
Rule 1. Install 301 redirects for domain.com so it redirects to www.domain.com
Rule 2. Go back to rule #1
JO
