Does G treat different canonical form links the same?

Should we request other sites to link to us in a consisent canonical form?

[arnarn]

I've tried searching and scanning other threads to find an answer to this question, but could not find the answer.

Is an inbound link from an external site treated differently if they use a different canonical form? e.g. If a site links to you as www.mysite.com and you're consistently mysite.com in G, is there any penalty? Should we request the other sites to use mysite.com instead of www.mysite.com?

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[tedster]

If you 301 redirect the urls in the links to your preferred canonical form, there's no problem. If you do not, your PageRank can be "split" over two "versions" of your page's url. It is even better if you can control the form of all your inbound links and get all the other websites to cooperate with your chosen scheme -- but that is not possible in every case.

[g1smd]

As tedster says, the 301 redirect is your friend. Make sure that all internal links go to the same one (www or non-www) too. Most people would choose www as the one to use.

Check what damage has already been done to your indexing using these searches:
site:domain.com
site:domain.com -inurl:www
site:www.domain.com
They can tell you a lot.

[arnarn]

Thanks to all for the comments / suggestions. It looks like from what you're saying that we shouldn't have any problems if inbound links from other sites use the www.domain.com form while we've standardized on the use of domain.com.

We implemented the 301 redirects in Aug / Sep of last year when there seemed to be a lot of discussion on canonical problems with G, and at some point GG indicating it was an issue.

In the last several months we have seen a general improvement (consistency) in G results. We used to see a lot of URL titles (only) and those seem to have been updated, and there is a solid trend toward the preferred form (domain.com) used in our 301s.

site:domain.com
site:domain.com -inurl:www
site:www.domain.com

Sometimes, we get site:domain.com to give a LARGE result, other times the result is SMALL.

Sometimes, site:www.domain.com gives 0, and other times, maybe relatively small (25% of LARGE).

With site:domain.com -url:www.domain.com, the result is about 80% of the site:domain.com results.

One comment though: there are SUBSATANTIAL differences between DCs in the suggested searches, which seems to be consistent with other observations in this forum.

At least we're still on G's radar (getting pretty significant crawl over the last 3 days). Maybe (soon?) the pages that went to supplemental last year will re-join the flock.

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[Ellio]

Always use absolute links both internally and externally and never use the index.htm, default.htm etc page names on homepages or subfolder homepages.

Ask external sites to link to [mysite.com...] or [mysite.com...] if possible.

Use 301's to redirect linked domains like .com, .net, to .co.uk if you have the full set.

Leave the rest to Google.