Google indexed my website too early...

[webing]

Hi, sorry if i'm at the wrong place or this question is repetitive but i could not find a solution to my problem.

My site is about 12 days old and all i've done with google is verify my website for the extra tools but some of my created pages which are not finished got indexed,sadly they did not have their meta tags but thats not my problem, my problem is that they get indexed double.
example.com, the other is indexed www.example.com, i would realy like to sort this out before adding new pages so anything i could do to remove 1?

also aprox how long would it take for google to edit the meta tags, i've heard it takes atleast a month, is that true?

a offtopic question - how or where(if possible) can i insert a meta tag in a phpbb forum?

Sorry for the stupid questions.

Thanks in advance.

[edited by: tedster at 3:58 pm (utc) on May 16, 2008]
[edit reason] swithc to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[BradleyT]

Is the site running on IIS or Apache? You'll want to 301 redirect www to non-www or vice versa depending on which you like.

Regardless, your first step is to go to webmaster tools and tell google the preferred version of your domain - with or without www.

[webing]

i'm not 100 percent sure but i do think it is Apache since when i was buying the hosting i was chosing what version i prefer. i have tried using the 301 redirect but never got it to work. i did go to webmasters tools and set it with the www. so can you tell me how i can redirect example.com to www.example.com please? Thanks for the answer!

[webing]

ok i just learned how to make my homepage redirect from example.com to www.example.com but would it only count for my homepage or for all pages? the way i'm thinking of doing it is to insert some code into the htaccess file? unluckily my cpanel server is down for 30 mins to try it out lol.

[g1smd]

The code in .htaccess can be made to work site-wide. That is the recommended action.

For a new site, i always develop on a password-protected subdomain, or in a password-protected folder, or on a local copy of Apache and PHP running on my laptop.

The live domain houses a couple of "coming soon" pages, or the old site.

Only when things are truly ready to go live do they get moved to the live domain.

[webing]

well it's my first time on a paid webhosting so i'm still learning but considering i could not get my website up the first 3 days i'm getting used to the change :P.

Thanks for clarifying.
You have a good idea about the Password protected subdomain and the coming soon pages but since it's my first time i had no idea that this could be useful but if i have any further domains i will sure use something like this, Thanks!

[bwnbwn]

the password protect is a great idea but if ya don't know how to make this happen the easiest for me is to add a meta tag
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> When the site is done remove it and your ok

[webing]

yeah i should of done that but i never knew my site was going to indexed so quick when there was no links what to it.

[Marcia]

I've seen a canonical issue (a serious one) solved with Google in just a few days, on a big older site. They started replacing with the correct URLs right off.

The code examples and explanations you'll find in the Apache forum here will work for the whole site. Not to worry!

[webing]

thats good to know. :) thx

[CainIV]

You get to learn alot - make sure to always develop the site behind the scenes, behind a login, and make sure google is not allowed. 301'ing pages should fix things :)

[webing]

yeah,trying to do that now, got an error but it's most likely my fault :).