'Doubled URL' has Page Rank, but not my domain root

[kellyman]

Hi Guys

I have been experiencing problems with my site since October with loss of rankings then with loss of page rank, first off i was thinking that this was a penalty or glitch, so i went through the site with a fine tooth comb deleted and updated any pages i thought could be the cause, then today I have found that my site has doubled its URL

Example

bluewidgets.co.uk/bluewidgets.co.uk (is the page rank 4) bluewidgets.co.uk (lost its page rank)

could this be the result of a rogue 301? or is there any other reason for this

many thanks for your time

[tedster]

It does sound like a rogue 301 - perhaps a typo in a regex somewhere in your infrastructure. Does your server actually resolve the doubled URL with a 200 http response?

[kellyman]

Hi Tedster

Thanks for the reply, the site has its own administrator and i asked him 2 months ago to check all the 301 and such, he advised all was ok, i will have to speak with him tomorrow in regard to the http response codes,

But its puzzled me how Google can now only see this as the home page, which without an obvious 301 seems strange as all the page rank and page juice has gone to the doubled URL bluewidgets.co.uk/bluewidgets.co.uk

[tedster]

Don't worry too much about understanding Google - rather you would focus on getting your server to behave appropriately.

If you put the doubled URL in a browser and your server sends back content without changing the URL, then your server does have a problem you need to fix.

[kellyman]

Great stuff and as i suspected..


many many thanks for taking the time to reply

Just one other question, if the above was the cause of my page rank loss and drop in rankings, after i get the issue resolved how long should i espect to see some of my rankings and PR come back ?

[tedster]

PR is only visible on the toolbar, and that can take months and months to change. It doesn't matter very much because what you want is a return of rankings and traffic.

It sounds like you have a complex situation - be sure you understand it technically quite well so you only need to fix things once. Making a string of changes can really dig a deep hole. My guess is that the doubled URL for your home page is just the surface of a more extensive issue.

[kellyman]

The PR is there but its changed now to the doubled url, so it must have some how been redirected there, the doubled URL is a PR 4 and i have no idea how it has happened

The problem i have my site sits on anothers server and i do not have direct access to see if there are any issues i have to take the word of the server owner who i believe to be very competant, so hopefully we can reset any changes made in the past and start from scratch

[phranque]

i would guess that all your internal navigation links to the home page refer to bluewidgets.co.uk which looks like a relative url in the browser.
if this is the case, change all those links so they refer to http://bluewidgets.co.uk/ which is an absolute url.

in addition, any request for http://bluewidgets.co.uk/bluewidgets.co.uk should be returning a 404 or a 301 redirect to the home page rather than a 200.

[edited by: tedster at 1:32 am (utc) on Jan 10, 2011]
[edit reason] bypass the automatic url hiding [/edit]

[TheMadScientist]

If what phranque says is the case (I think it sounds likely) then I would definitely recommend looking into why the page is returning a 200 rather than a 404...

Do you use custom error pages?

[Robert Charlton]

i would guess that all your internal navigation links to the home page refer to bluewidgets.co.uk which looks like a relative url in the browser

I had essentially a similar thought this afternoon... and was thinking about how and why it might have happened.

I was thinking that the error probably came about because someone who'd heard of canonicalization was trying to avoid linking to index.html, and came up with bluewidgets.co.uk as the alternative. This format as a relative url therefore is likely.

I've also seen similar problems (but not the same) in absolute urls. I'm looking at a variant of this right now in a WordPress blog where I know the following was hard-coded into a page code when the owner moved his blog...

http://example.com/blog/http:/category/business-and-technology/

In this case, the pages all return 200 OK, and Google has even indexed the pages under these urls.

The question you might need to look at is where in the process the error got introduced... whether in your CMS, in your development software, in your server configuration files, or in some sort of server control panel setup input form... or in coding, perhaps even in a coder's interpretation of the url specs that were provided.

[kellyman]

Do you use custom error pages?

All pages should be returning a 404 if invalid

The question you might need to look at is where in the process the error got introduced... whether in your CMS, in your development software, in your server configuration files, or in some sort of server control panel setup input form... or in coding, perhaps even in a coder's interpretation of the url specs that were provided.

I think your spot on with your post Robert, it was hard coded in by my web developer, i will need to get him today to receck what he has done, hopefully get this resolved today

Just hope no long term damage done as this is costing me a fortune in lost revenue

But one question still remains

If
www.bluewidgets
and
www.bluewidgets/www.bluewidgets

both still remain why has PR and Link juice been passed to the www.bluewidgets/www.bluewidgets

BTW

below is the actual URL if it helps

goo.gl/Y35Rn

[kellyman]

The question you might need to look at is where in the process the error got introduced... whether in your CMS, in your development software, in your server configuration files, or in some sort of server control panel setup input form... or in coding, perhaps even in a coder's interpretation of the url specs that were provided.

When i first saw this issue yesterday i thought it was good news as i knew i had a issue but did not know what it exactly was.

Today we have been on it for 5 hours and still cannot find where the duoubled URLs are comming from, we know its some kind of coding error, but as the site is taking feeds from another database this is where the issue lies "somewhere in there"

I have tempory put 301 the double url to the absolute home page, but for the life of me cannot find where or how the site has passed its PR to the double url, we removed all 301s and any other hard coded redirects and the problem is still there.

I hope the 301 helps but cannot help wondering if the site already has a 301 to the doubled URL and all im doing is passing it back causing a continuous loop

[TheMadScientist]

Hmmm...

The first thing I would do is use the server header check here in the control panel and see if the page maybe returns something, uh, odd? like HTTP/1.1 404 Undescribed rather than 404 Not Found, then I would take a look at the source code and check the robots meta tag and make sure it didn't say anything funny like 'index,follow' on the 404 page rather than 'noindex', then I wouldn't worry about the links to it or where they came from or how they got there and just redirect anything starting with /www. back to the home page just so it doesn't happen again...

[tedster]

Do you see requests for the doubled URL in your server logs - coming from some place other than Google? If so that might be a clue to the problem's source.

[cloudtap]

Have you checked robots.txt as well as your .htaccess files for all of your site directories and subdirectories?

[kellyman]

Great news, i found the issue

whilst running IIS site analysis text,i came across the culprit.

"The page contains unnecessary redirects.

The link to "http://www.bluewidgets.co.uk/www.bluewidgets.co.uk" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.bluewidgets.co.uk/".
Search engines can only pass page rankings and other relevant data through a single redirection hop. Using unnecessary redirects can have a negative impact on page ranking.

If redirection is not the intended behavior, consider replacing the link URL to point directly to the destination URL"

I put a link into one of my articles and missed the http: from the href now and i have no idea how but Google has interperated this as a redirect.

But now i have resolved all the issues (and a few more besides)

Thank you everyone who contributed and help me resolve this as i could not have done this without your clues and direction

[g1smd]

Running a tool such as Xenu LinkSleuth over your site would have uncovered this and many other issues in minutes.

[kellyman]

Running a tool such as Xenu LinkSleuth over your site would have uncovered this and many other issues in minutes.

I wish i knew that a few days ago, but i sure do now

Anyhow Excellent news the PR has returned to the homepage less than 24 hours after fixing the problem .. I would have prefered the rankings to increase but im now 100% confident this will happen in the comming weeks but the PR returning means we have fixed the issue