Canonical Issue Because of Webmaster Tools?

Google shows both www and non-www after adding site to webmaster tools

[stgeorge]

Hi

This is a really weird one (or is it?)

I have quite an old site, few thousand pages, thousands of inbound links. Content is mostly unique (well almost all of it).

Never did much "hard core" seo, but followed the guidelines as much as we could. Smeone suggested we look at the google webmaster tools, following a discussion about inbound links in inner pages.

So on Feb 8, I verify the site in webmaster tools to have a scratch around. Interesting.

Then two days later I see some strange things happening (wathing the whole index problem going on at the moment ie the 1 to 3 of 260 issue), suddenly the www and non-www versions show up in the index, with the www version showing no cache.

We had never done a 301 redirect, never needed to...

Eventually I stumble accross the "preferred site" option in the webmaster tools, which is set to the third option, which means "do nothing".

So here is my theory:

No 301 redirect
Webmaster tools pick up no redirect, and chnages a setting somewhere for my site which results in the canonization / canonicle (sic) issue.

So I am saying that maybe the webmaster tools has brought the lack of 301 redirect to the attention of the algorithms?

Now, because we have good rankings, we dont just want to change things, so my question is, should we now do a 301 redirect, or use the webmaster tools to tell the spider that the www- version is the primary?

In the same period, Google news has stopped crawling our news. We have been a news feed for several years. This could be unrelatred, but thought I'd ask anyway.

Thanks very much if you read this ;)

[tedster]

What you are guessing here does sound possible - at least to someone like me who is not behind the scenes at Google. Whatever the cause, it sounds like you're now "in the soup". I'd suggest you do the canonical 301 fix and then mirror your choice in Webmaster Tools. This may not fix everything, but it's certainly a start. Without the 301 you may be losing the power of many backlinks.

[stgeorge]

Thanks for the reply.

So if we do the 301, I suppose the change in Webmaster tools is largely semantic, telling the webmaster tools how to respresent the index?

We also notice that our.../default.asp is suddenly indexed as well, so we'll have to redirect that one as well.

Oh joy.

[Ledfish]

We also notice that our.../default.asp is suddenly indexed as well, so we'll have to redirect that one as well.

Just ahd the same problem occur for us in the last ten days as well.

Not sure how this occurred when it was not a problem before.