Splitting hairs with reconsideration request

[1script]

So, you did some major site cleanup and ready to file an RR. Which site you are requesting to reconsider, example.com or www.example.com ?

They both seem to live their merry (or not) separate lives in WMT, very confusing. Some info is available for one or another yet some other info is on both. I understand that it was done for the benefit of those people that have millions of subdomains (i.e. for the benefit of content farms G loves so much) - but for your traditional site where example.com does not exist as a separate entity from www.example.com, which is the proper name to use for RR, does anyone think it makes any difference?

[ColourOfSpring]

I'd submit the domain you are using - www or non-www. Yes it is confusing in that Google treat them so differently, just because technically they are different domains (www being a subdomain).

I can never for the life of me understand why Google treat www and non-www as different. 99.999% of the time one is an alias for the other (in reality). Why do Google treat them as distinct websites? They should make a special clause for the "www" subdomain as being an alias for the domain name. I see so many sites that were "www" go to non-www and vice versa because they believe Google will treat the "new domain" as a "new site" and thus side-step whatever Google penalty they are under (never tried this with my own sites, but I see this ALL THE TIME with sites that join the directories I admin).

[netmeg]

Because they ARE different, and that pre-dates Google. If they treated them the same, they'd be breaking the standard.

I would send in the reconsideration on whichever is the "official" for the site.

[ColourOfSpring]

Because they ARE different, and that pre-dates Google. If they treated them the same, they'd be breaking the standard.

1script already noted that, as I did - it's obvious. Everyone knows this. However, in actual reality, the www subdomain is an alias for the domain name in almost every single case. As I mentioned in my comment, the fact that Google treat them as technically different (and they are not technically wrong to treat them technically different), it's encouraged so many domain name owners to alternate between the two in the hopes that Google do indeed treat the switch as a move to a "new domain" (which it actually is, but I thought I'd use quotation marks because we all know it isn't really).

In real terms, it's just a mistake to confuse www and non-www in almost every single case because they are aliases for each other. I'm SURE Google (in reality) knows this, but officially doesn't recognise this.

Seriously, anyone who has DNS control over a domain name - they're going to make two different sites - one www, one non-subdomain (non www) - two different sites? Technically they can do that, but it would be a marketing disaster. Who is going to say "www.foo.com" is our site that sells A, foo.com sells B". Nobody does that.

[edited by: ColourOfSpring at 7:43 pm (utc) on Apr 6, 2013]

[1script]

@netmeg: I don't think it's quite THAT simple. I've never actually submitted non-www version, it always appeared by itself. In other words, a domain and a host (www) are separate entities in WMT but not even quite independent as the standard would suggest. I imagine it's totally possible that the penalty is applied to the www version only but then, since there's site-wide penalty, it's not that big of a stretch to imagine there may be domain-wide penalties, too. I think we also do know now (confirmed by MC) that there are also webmaster-wide penalties, too (i.e. they ax all *your* sites). So, yeah, we are swimming in the ocean of penalties and it would be great to have some understanding of what is it you're asking them to remove.

Anyway, I've submitted it for www version, we'll see what happens.

[netmeg]

Seriously, anyone who has DNS control over a domain name - they're going to make two different sites - one www, one non-subdomain (non www) - two different sites? Technically they can do that, but it would be a marketing disaster. Who is going to say "www.foo.com" is our site that sells A, foo.com sells B". Nobody does that.

I've had two clients who did that for dev purposes. Wasn't my choice, but it was already done when I got there. In each case the dev site was walled off from Google.

And if Google *did* treat them the same, then they'd get just as much flack for breaking the standard.

(Bing also treats them separately if one is not redirected to the other)

I don't think it's quite THAT simple. I've never actually submitted non-www version, it always appeared by itself.

Well presumably you use one or the other when you refer to the site or promote it - that's probably the one you want to submit.

If one redirects to the other, I suspect that a penalty applied to one applies to the other, and that goes for lifting as well.

[ColourOfSpring]

I've had two clients who did that for dev purposes. Wasn't my choice, but it was already done when I got there. In each case the dev site was walled off from Google.

And if Google *did* treat them the same, then they'd get just as much flack for breaking the standard.

It would be super-easy for Google to see if the www and non-www were different - spider them. If they're different, treat them as separate domains. If one redirects to the other OR simply shows the same content, treat them as the same, and certainly not "duplicate content" (if one does not redirect to the other). There should be no need to have two seperate "sites" in GWT for the latter case.

[1script]

All this talk about different hosts on a domain and their separate treatment by Google made me think about mobile versions of sites. I am about to embark on a huge project trying to create a mobile version of a site from scratch (i.e. no programming or layout currently used there is well suited for small screens, so I need to write all that anew) and and I'm just thinking what sort of issues await me there in WMT when I will have not just two but three versions of essentially (but not exactly) the same site:

example.com | www.example.com - completely identical

m.example.com - same content but different pagination, layout

This is OT here in this message, I'm probably going to go on an extensive search for previous posts that cover this and if I don't find enough, I'll start another one