Yet another www v/w non -www

what is the best step now?

[wanna_learn]

Today I noticed that my pages which used to rank with "www" have been replaced by non - www version.

What would friends over here suggest to deal with this situation?

[tedster]

I don't know that there's much new to say:

1. Add <base href=> element to the head section of very page.
2. Fix links to all include "www" -- all internal links, and external inbounds as much as possible.
3. If your hosting arrangement allows, 301 redirect all no-www request to with-www urls.

Just steps 1&2 have fixed the issue for a number of sites I know of. And BigDaddy promises to fix things on its own -- so it may sort out if your just wait. But the above steps shouldn't hurt.

[Brian]

This debate seems to occur every 10 minutes. As someone with non-wwww, I've still never heard of why anyone would want to add all that to the front of a url. Just makes a mouthful if you ask me.

I know Google does it, but I've never had one second of an issue about not using them.

[g1smd]

The issue comes when some pages of the site are listed with www and other pages are listed without the www. The redirect and the base tag fix things so that everything is listed as one or the other - you choose which one (including the www is the more popular option).

.

Just let me also repost something else which is relevant here too:

Beware of a 301 redirect from non-www to www where the defaultsitename is domain.com and where you are linking to a folder, and where you forget to add the trailing / to the URL in the link.

If you forget the trailing / then your link to www.domain.com/folder will first be redirected to domain.com/folder/ {without www!} before arriving at the required www.domain.com/folder/ page.

The intermediate step, at domain.com/folder/ will kill your listings. Luckily, this effect is very easy to see if you use Xenu LinkSleuth to check your site: it shows up as reporting double the number of pages (when you generate the sitemap) that you actually have, with half of the pages having a title of "301 Moved".

[Marval]

g1smd
exactly - some config files call it the ServerName config - and it needs to be set to go to the www.domain.com version instead of the domain.com as the default setting in Apache(unfortunately not all hosts do this) to avoid that site/page dupe issue with relative path setups and as of yet I havent seen any proof that BD has fixed that issue.

[wanna_learn]

Hi

Please ignore my non-technical background

can .htaccess file to do a 301 redirect work?

Can anyone post the code to be written in .htaccess file assuming my domain is www.mysite.com

[wanna_learn]

or best is to wait and see if BD fix the issue itself?
I can see non-www version on 64.233.179.104

[jtbell]

can .htaccess file to do a 301 redirect work?

Yes. Do a Google search on "htaccess 301 redirect" and you'll get plenty of examples of how to do it.

[wanna_learn]

Hi

more I search about this more I get confused by different .htaccess formats

All of my pages are in Root folder and I normally use absolute linking to www version.

Can anybody help with suitable .htaccess code

[g1smd]

I posted this code over 200 times [google.com] in 2005 alone. I suppose once more won't hurt.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

[Wizard]

Some hosts are configured to show a copy of a site for every subdomain (for example if you write abcd.domain.com you see duplicate of domain.com) - perhaps they have ServerAlias *.domain.com directive. It makes a risk that your competitor link to your subdomains and kill your ranking by many duplicate pages. To avoid this, I use a different version of rewrite rules:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [domain.com...] [L,R=301]

It is also useful if you have additional domains on your server (for example with misspelled company name) and want to redirect them to one canonical address.

[g1smd]

If you have multiple domains that all serve the same content with status "200" then you have duplicate content and it will get you into a lot of trouble.

301 redirect = permanent: Point as many domains as you like at one piece of content, each being a "301 redirect" and only the single URL that returns the content with "200" status will be indexed. This is the correct method. Add a base tag to clarify which domain you want listed, if you want to too.

302 redirect = temporary: much abused by spammers and hijackers. Avoid using this type of redirect. Google for "302 hijack" for more details.