www or non www

frontpage or asp

[stevelibby]

Hi all
I have noticed something quite strange and i want to see if there is anyone else with the same issue. I own a number of web sites. All are listed in the search engine and do very well.
my current profile is that they are listed on windows platform and up till last year they were programmed with frontpage results wizard with .asp pages. Now i have been learning hard coding asp. i have used this on "some" of my web sites, i have suddenly noticed something odd...the web sites with front page results wizard sites there are <b>NO canconical</b> issues at all, however those with hard coded asp appear to have issues. This issue has only been an issue in G and not the other search engines!
Am i barking up the wrong tree or could i be on to something here, does anyone else have the same platform as me?

[g1smd]

What do you mean by "canonical issues"?

That term has been misused in many posts in this forum, so I want to clarify exactly what you mean by that first.

[stevelibby]

G having issues with www.domain.co.uk and domain.co.uk.
I have just redesigned one of my sites that was originally coded in frontpage results wizard that had no issues with www or non www and was shown in G with www.domain.co.uk and ranked nicely, i have now changed it to hard coded asp, now it shows as either www. or non after the latest crawl.
One of my major sites that i changed to asp has had this problem since august last year when i made the switch. I am very, very tempted to revert back to frontpage results wizard, but i cant seem to understand why G appears to be having an issue with it, yet its only the home that is having the issue also!

[webdoctor]

Perhaps you should use something like Xenu's link sleuth to crawl your site.

You can then check to see if you have accidentally linked to example.com/page.asp instead of www.example.com/page.asp from one of your pages.

[stevelibby]

I have used slueth and there are no links that point to index.asp or to domain.co.uk, just appears odd that i change the site and then suddenly G has trouble indexing the home page, yet deep folders dont have a problem!

[webdoctor]

Have you checked your log files to see if Googlebot has actually retrieved the home page recently?

How is your site set up, does a GET request for '/' actually return a page, or does it return a 30x redirect to index.asp or index.aspx?

[stevelibby]

hi
I`m not quite with you on what you have just commented on?

[webdoctor]

If a search engine or visitor requests the URL from your site like this

http://www.example.com/

then it is possible (though unlikely) that your webserver actually issues an immediate 30x Redirect and sends them to

http://www.example.com/index.asp

You can check this with wget or just by visting the site in a browser and seeing what you get if you ask for www.example.com/ without any page name.

[stevelibby]

would the same be if i used serverheader script

[g1smd]

Crawl your site using Xenu LinkSleuth but do it twice, once starting at domain.com and then again starting at www.domain.com and see if you can access the whole site (if you used relative links then you will be able to do that).

The fix is to either

- add the <base href="http://www.domain.com/"> tag to every page, and set up a 301 redirect from non-www to www (all internal links should then START with a / and count from the root) OR

- to hard code every link on every page with the full domain-and-page URL (this latter option will increase bandwith quite a lot, and should be avoided).