You have 1 unresolved issue: Redundant Hostnames. Best way to handle this? (Google Analytics)

[Play_Bach]

I'm getting a 'You have 1 unresolved issue: Redundant Hostnames.' alert in my Google Analytics. First time I've seen this!

Property http://www.example.com is receiving data from redundant hostnames. Consider setting up a 301 redirect on your website, or make a search and replace filter that strips "www." from hostnames. Examples of redundant hostnames: example.com, www.example.com.

Anybody else get this? Thanks.

[JD_Toims]

I haven't gotten the message you're asking about, but from the example you gave, the best fix I know of if you're on an Apache server is:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.example\.com)?$
RewriteRule .? http://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

It's a bit different for ISAPI on Windows, but the principal is the same, meaning redirect all versions of a domain which are not your preferred version to your preferred version -- If you're on Apache and your preferred version is example.com rather than www.example.com, simply remove the www\. from the condition and the www. from the rule above.

Also, note: the preceding should go after any current redirects in place and any current redirects should also point to the preferred version of the domain to avoid "chained" or "stacked" redirects being present.

[lucy24]

I haven't gotten the message you're asking about

Well, you wouldn't, would you ;) I'm sure you've had a domain-name-canonicalization redirect in place for years.

Does this mean G### is getting to work figuring out which things are true Duplicate Content and which are simply the same page under different URLs? Hurrah, if so. Last time I looked at "who links to you" in gwt, one European blogger had clambered up the list by simply expanding from 2 to 4 to twenty-five (really) separate listings for the identical page. Maybe each month's archiving creates a new URL. It can't be any fun for the search engine, having to crawl them all on the off chance that one of them will turn out to be different. (No fun for google, anyway. I suspect Bing kinda enjoys it.)

[JD_Toims]

I'm sure you've had a domain-name-canonicalization redirect in place for years.

Er, uh, well, yes, you got me -- I have :)

Does this mean G### is getting to work figuring out which things are true Duplicate Content and which are simply the same page under different URLs? Hurrah, if so.

Wouldn't that be nice after all these years of people worrying about things they really shouldn't need to worry about? We can only hope they finally take care of the issue on their end.

(No fun for google, anyway. I suspect Bing kinda enjoys it.)

I think Bing might too since they have a totally different approach to duplicate content than Google -- Call them crazy, but they think if they've indexed it once and find it again and ignore the later version they won't have to deal with duplicates in their results, so once something is indexed with Bing, they basically chew up and spit out later copies of it -- How novel?!

[GodLikeLotus]

Yes, I also seem to have this message this morning, but have no idea why.

[EditorialGuy]

I'm getting an "Unresolved issue" alert, too. It's about "unused filters." I deleted the unused filters, but I'm still getting the message. It doesn't seem to be doing any harm, but it's an annoyance (as most pop-ups are).