Sites listed twice in Webmaster Tools, with www and without

[notsosmart]

Title pretty much says it all. Suddenly, goog's webmaster tools is listing two versions of each of my sites. Well, not suddenly, it's been like that for a while, I've just never paid much mind.

But I am starting to wonder if Google thinks I have two versions of each site? Seems to me they should be smarter than that, but perhaps not?

Anyone else have this problem?

I remember long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (think Infoseek), this was a potential problem. But I would think that Google would be smart enough to know that they are the same site... but then why show them TWICE in the tools?

[smallcompany]

I know that when I selected my site to always be WWW. version, G asked me to verify the non-WWW version by entering it as a second site - which is exactly what you have now.

It sounds like it happened "by itself" in your case, and that is new for me.

In regards of the two site versions, actually www and non-www can be different sites.
It seems to be an assumption that those would be the same site. As you may have noticed, there are instances like ww2, ww3, or www3, not even sure now... and all of these could be different sites as www is simply a subdomain of the main domain.

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[lucy24]

goog's webmaster tools is listing two versions of each of my sites

This is normal and is what's supposed to happen. Just make sure everything redirects appropriately on the server end, and for each site, tell google your preferred name.

Some aspects of the two sites will be identical in gwt. Pay attention to the ones that are different; that's where you will notice things like sites linking to the wrong form of your name.

[netmeg]

If they're both verified, then someone must have done it.

I frequently will have both sites verified in my GWT, specially if I've cleaned up a situation for a client where they didn't have one properly redirected to the other. It's not a bad thing as long as your site is properly configured.

[g1smd]

If both versions directly show content with "200 OK" status, you have a problem that needs to be fixed.

If one of them has a page-by-page redirect to the other, then all is OK.

[notsosmart]

.
If both versions directly show content with "200 OK" status, you have a problem that needs to be fixed.

If one of them has a page-by-page redirect to the other, then all is OK.

Would you mind expounding on that a bit?

By "200" I assume you mean, "does the url without the www return content exactly the same as with www" Am I correct?

And since this is the case, how would I go about fixing it? It seems impossible to me... Unless there is a server-level fix that I can implement, I don't see how I can prevent goog from coming to the site from non-www links...

BTW all my internal links are full URLs, http://www.example.com/

[edited by: phranque at 8:22 pm (utc) on Aug 12, 2013]
[edit reason] exemplified domain [/edit]

[netmeg]

Doesn't matter - if both www and non-www serve content (instead of one redirecting to the other) then you have a potential duplicate content issue. How you fix it depends on what technology you're using - if are running on Apache, you can fix it in .htaccess; if you are running on Microsoft I'm sure you can do it, but I dunno how. Never worked with IIS.

There are forums here for both of those technologies, and this question is asked a lot so if you go check there I'm sure you'll find your answer.

[g1smd]

The fact that the site always links to www is a bonus. However, a couple of lines of code to redirect all non-www requests to www is maybe all you need to add.

You don't want to block access to non-www; instead you need to tell anyone that asks for a non-www URL that they must make a new request for the www version.

[ken_b]

I have this same issue.

And I have a functioning 301 redirect in place from non-www. to www.

[notsosmart]

Thanks, I will investigate using .htaccess

[lucy24]

I have this same issue.

And I have a functioning 301 redirect in place from non-www. to www.

"same" = wmt lists both versions of the site?

Sometimes an issue is just an issue ;) It's not a problem. Check periodically to see if anyone is linking to the "wrong" form of the name, especially if it's a site you're on speaking terms with so they'll fix it if you ask.

[ken_b]

"same" = wmt lists both versions of the site?

Yup.

Check periodically to see if anyone is linking to the "wrong" form of the name,

Hmmm, hadn't thought of that. Off to see what turns up.

.

[ken_b]

So I checked G WMT to see if there are any links reported as pointing to the non-www version of my site.

Nope, none, zero "No Data Available".

Same for "internal links"

.

[lucy24]

They can never list internal links, because the only way they'd be able to find them is by going to the non-www site-- which they can't, because they've been redirected.

No external links to non-canonical hostname is good.

:: detour here to confirm that "No data available" is what mine says too for "wrong" hostname ::

Question for anyone who knows: If you give your same-site links in full http et cetera form, just like an external link, will they show up on the "internal links" side or the "links to your site" side?