WMT shows www and non-www as 2 sites, in spite of 301

[Tonearm]

All of my site's pages 301 redirect from example.com to www.example.com. I set up www.example.com in Webmaster Tools a while ago and my "Preferred domain" setting is for www.example.com. I logged in today for the first time in quite a while and there are two website listings, one for www.example.com and one for example.com labeled "New". example.com has no data in the dashboard at all.

Has anyone seen this before?

[lucy24]

I think they've always done it, you just don't notice unless you stumble onto that preliminary screen that shows all your sites. Then they're lined up two by two even if every setting in the world specifies one name or the other.

[g1smd]

Yes. The two different hostnames (www and non-www) have separate reports.

Redirect non-www to www and you'll see that Google still requests several non-www URLs per week. They at least test whether the redirect is still in place and they also request the robots.txt file several times per month.

You should continue to look at the non-www report from time to time. I have found several new high-traffic links pointing at the non-www version of the site on several occasions in the past. Since they point at the non-www version they aren't listed in the report for the www version of the site, nor should they be.

[lucy24]

nor should they be

Shouldn't it at least show up as "via this intermediate link"? Or did they dump that line when I wasn't looking?

:: detour for quick look ::

Nope, no fresh pile of spammy links on the other side, but an equal mystery. Crawl Errors on mysite.com without www says that they couldn't crawl the site because they couldn't get to robots.txt. There's no corresponding error on the with www side. The redirect happens at the server level, so what the ### are they talking about?

:: further detour to logs to make sure Error Log (which includes all 403s) isn't unpleasantly plump after latest htaccess tweak ::

Huh. Insert "no idea" emoticon here. Shrug. Google has its reasons, whereof reason knoweth nothing. Or something like that.

[g1smd]

The circumstances where the "via" message shows up in WMT for redirects, are limited. You have to drill down all the way, per URL, to see the message.

For redirect A -> B -> C, the message certainly shows up when A and B are on the same sub-domain and C is on a different sub-domain or on a wholly different domain.