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Having been around for a while and knowing that Dominic was a little different, I knew to play it cool and wait.
I then saw the start of Esmerelda and saw only minor fluctuation in ranking of 180-210. At that point I knew that there must be something wrong. I then saw that DMOZ linked to me at http://domain.com, and I had all higher internal pages also not using www in link to index due to a hotkey I assigned to homepage URL text leaving out www. I added www in internals and added the following to htaccess:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.domain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Two days later, on Thursday of last week during the update, the site skyrocketed to number 4, for a moderately competitive search term on some of the datacenters (due to freshie finding the redirection?). I'm sorry I can't remember whether or not it was the datacenters with or without the new update.
Four days after that, on Monday, the site dropped to around 200 again on all datacenters.
Some additional info...several hundred internal pages rank very well for their terms; it's just the index that I can't get up there for the main search term.
So the question is, was dropping back due to freshie finding the redirect and temporarily causing the #4 ranking and everything will be fine assuming something like another traditional update? Are there other steps I should take? With the background info I provided was the problem in fact due to the missing www in internal and external links?
I found dozens of posts lately about what to do to fix the missing www prob (I knew how to do that) but nothing about the aftermath. And I know Brett has some experience with this and WW...any thoughts Brett, or others?
Thanks in advance,
Kevin
One thing I also discovered for anyone considering a rewrite in htaccess to handle the www vs. non-www is make sure all forms on your site have www version for action. Thank God all mine did except 1. Lesson, make everything www always! Does that sound like the right lesson?
Yes, all sorts of interesting changes. I moved a small, low-PR site to a new IP yesterday, and Googlebot crawled it today. What happened to the old, "Googlebot's still using my old IP address after 3 weeks" problem? Maybe that's one of the recent improvements from FreshDeepBot!
I'm watching the threads here closely, but I don't think it matters whether you go with www- or non-www. Just pick one and use it with utter consistency. The non-www is shorter, but people are used to www. The non-www makes a branded domain name more prominent by "uncluttering" it, but "www." serves as a visual cue that it's a Web address on a printed page and an auditory cue that an announcer is about to read a Web address. Non-www is easier for type-in, www is what we're used to. Hundreds of reasons to go either way. Want a solid answer? Do market studies and conversion tracking.
Jim
I think part of my being indexed with both domain.com and www.domain.com was from moving to a new IP. I left my site on both to make sure google didn't lose me, and for a few weeks, google crawled both. I didn't get lost though, so maybe it was good thinking (advice from those here at WW) to do both servers, especially considering I did the move right as Dominic began. Hope your transition to a new IP is smooth.
Can be a lot quicker with selective Find and Replace in a text editor.
Just pick one and use it with utter consistency
Really, i think consistency is key as well, and the 'net is full of special cases (just as always :-)
In my own special case, i didn't even have the CNAME with www in my DNS-setup for a while - i only put it in because, as you said "people are used to it", and i thought it would be userfriendly towards the less www-savvy part of my audience. This implies that a visitor would simply get a 404 when trying to use the domain with www - in this case, a redirect makes more sense.
/claus
And there are most definately changes recently in how google handles this issue. So it's no surprise at all if major sites will quickly start to stick to www. It should be interesting to watch.
Kevin
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www.home-based-business-opportunities-guide.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [home-based-business-opportunities-guide.com...] [R,L]
Is that correct? Just to make sure ;)
This just happened. Really chuffed!
Khuntley, I can report a similar experience to yours now. First it reappeared in one centre, then two or three, and so on, until finally I'm back on all 9. Excellent stuff.
Also, when I search for domain.com, I no longer appear to get the straight [domain.com...] in the results. It seems the domains are now consolidated. what a relief!
> Is that correct?
No, not quite. Your posted code does a temporary redirect, which G will ignore. Use {R=301,L] to specify a permanent redirect. Also, your code ALLOWS uppercase and mixed-case URLs to go unredirected, because of the [NC] in the RewriteCond. I doubt you want to allow those URL variants to propagate.
Try:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.h-b-b-o-guide.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.h-b-b-o.com/$1 [R[b]=301[/b],L]
HTH,
Jim
Thanks a lot for your reply, Changes are done :)
Sorry about the URl, but the "Edit" botton just disappeared in the above post!
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^domain\.com
RewriteRule ^.*$ [domain.com%{REQUEST_URI}...] [R=301,L]
Ignoring the fact that I am doing the opposite of above, that is forcing things to domain.com without www, is this variation technically correct? It definitely 'works' in a practical sense.
differences in the syntax
That's mainly because the scripting language isn't very strict. Things tend to be possible to do in a variety of ways.
<added>That is: There's always more than one way of doing things (even technically correct)</added>
Your example could be written in other ways (all these examples can), but if it works (and it should) then it ain't broken, so why fix it? ;)
