Webmaster tools showing www. and non www. versions

[jtl4]

Hello, in my webmaster tools, sorted by health, each of my sites is duplicated. There is a version with the www at the front, and one without.

Configuration > Settings is set to "Display URLs as www" for each site.
Health > Index status gives completely different stats for each.
Health > Crawl stats for the non www version are really intermittent and it only picks up a couple of pages each time, where the www version looks normal.

I cannot make any sense of it, but I am wondering whether google have decided there are two identical websites for some reason. If I type in the domain without the www it brings up the site up with the www, which looks right.

Any suggestions?
Thank you

[denisl]

This appears to be normal according to this recent discussion:

[webmasterworld.com ]

[g1smd]

You can and should register both versions.

You'll see that various crawl, linking and other reports are separate for each.

[DigiSEO]

Yeah. It's frustrating. I hate having totally different data, crawling reports, inbound links, indexed pages and other data between the www and non www versions of my site. I have done everything you're supposed to do with the .htaccess and have made sure everything points to the www version, but WMT doesn't care. Everyone says not to worry about it, but it just so happens that it is my site that was hit hard by panda.

[g1smd]

When Googlebot requests example.com/page and www.example.com/page those are two different URLs.

It is important that you see how many requests each one gets and how many links each one has.

With the right redirects in place, Googlebot will request the non-canonical versions less and less.

Looking at the incoming links report for the non-canonical hostname gives you some clues as to which sites need to amend the way they link to your site.

I'm looking at an 8 year old site that had major work done to it about 18 months ago. Googlebot now requests 800-1100 www URLs per day and 0-6 non-www URLs per day. That tells me things are as "fixed" as they are ever going to be.

A combined crawl report would be completely useless.

[lucy24]

Configuration > Settings is set to "Display URLs as www" for each site.
...
If I type in the domain without the www it brings up the site up with the www, which looks right.

If you have set WMT to a preferred form, and you have a redirect in place for that same preferred form, then you are doing everything you need to do.

If it's working right, all Links to your site will be listed under your preferred sitename, with a "via this intermediate link" line for the ones that link to your other name. This is not especially helpful, but seems to be the way they do it.