Possible canonicalization penalty?

[Timetraveler]

Hi,

We recently developed a new domain where at first we had the site going to the non-www version. The site is brand new and after it got crawled I noticed we were using the non-www version and Google crawled the whole site as such.

So, I decided to 301 everything to the www version.

Before, we had 81 pages in Google...that's how many pages the site actually has, not just what google indexed.

Ever since the 301, I now show 130 pages (81 previously) for the non-www version and 16 for the www version.

After the 301 to the www version our homepage disappeared for keyword in domain search, whereas it was previously on page 6.

Because the site is new, and we are still gaining links it's taking a really long time to crawl and get the pages switched over.

I never really thought this type of canonicalization could cause a duplicate content penalty, but would you assume this is the case and does it tend to last just as long as it takes G to go through a full deep crawl and re-cache everything with the right url?

[tedster]

Be careful how you use the word "penalty". There is no penalty merely for duplicate content or canoncial issues. It can still hurt your rankings, as you've seen - but you've got the 301 in place. As long as that redirect is technically solid, then you are just experiencing a painful re-indexing period. And you may not ever see the return of your early "honeymoon period" rankings.

If you had implemented the 301 redirect in the other direction, going from "with-www" to "no-www", then you would not have seen this problem. By going in the revers direction from what Google already indexed, what you did was change every url on your site.

[tedster]

Here's an added thought - you may want to reinforce the 301 in some of these three ways, just to speed thing along:

1. Add the new rel="canonical" meta tag to every page/
2. Make sure none of your internal linking uses a no-www url
3. Use Webmaster Tools to show your preferred version

[Timetraveler]

Thanks Ted, I made those changes. Couldn't quite figure out exactly how to make the rel=canonical meta change because I'm not the best at coding and didnt know how to add it for pages non-www pages with the 301 in place or if it was possible. Hopefully the above changes will be sufficient once I get the site a little more robust with more content and consistent links.

I am noticing very slowing that page numbers are increasing (on both sides). Internal pages are ranking pretty much normally. Homepage seems to be the main page that got hit with the disappearing act for the keywordkeyword.com searched as keyword keyword. Nothing from 1 through the end of results. :( Hopefully it pops its head back up once everything is consistently on the proper url.