Forum Moderators: open
Thank you all for all the information on this message board.
I have a site that has both "widgets.com" and "www.widgets.com" indexed when I do site:widgets.com. Normally I would think, great more pages indexed, but I do see different pages cached and I do want one over the other (ie the cached www.widgets.com page has my latest and greatest optimization). Is re-submitting "widgets.com" recommended? Another related question is how long should I wait before re-submitting a site to Google, and is there a difference between submitting "widgets.com" and "www.widgets.com"?
Sorry if this sounds newbie but I couldn't find anything specific to this topic on the Google Knowledge base. Thanks again!
You don't need to resubmit to Google, the bot follows links and they find everything.
In fact, it is technically quite easy to put completely different sites at root and the www subdomain. Only a weirdo does this, but I actually saw a case like this in the wild once. For the purposes of search engines, redirecting all requests to root to the www subdomain is the best way to go.
... or the other way round i presume? I have asked for facts and evidence on a few occasions on this but never had great feedback - is it consistency or is it www that is the best?
Personally i have just (within the last week) abandoned the "www." prefix for my most important domain (yes, right in the middle of "Fritz"-whatever). I have done this out of concern for (a) my users, and (b) branding (and because, as Marcia and rfgdxm1 also suggests, it simply makes no sense technically that the site resides on a subdomain of the site). I do suppose, however, that ranking will improve because of consistency alone.
The site is six years old and have sofar occupied both domains. I know that most backlinks for this domain is with "www." and i know that most bookmarks and type-ins will also be so for a while, but i have done it anyway. It's perhaps rather wild to do so (now), but i have observed past success for other sites not using "www." and i have a very strong feeling that it's not the "www." it's consistency.
/claus
added: Technically i use mod_rewrite to 301-redirect all incoming traffic on the "www." subdomain to the same address on the domain itself.
added2: TheTruth, if you prefer the www-subdomain-solution, or even "xxx.domain.com", "zzz.domain.com" or so, then by all means go for it, i think consistency is key also the other way round.
By the way, out of curiosity, say when you make a change, submit to google, and results aren't quite what you wanted (lower ranking!) how long should you wait before submitting again?
my-domain.com
stands out more then a
www.my-domain.com
might be another advantage.
SN
Redirecting www to root works just as well.
That's what i did - kept the CNAME and did a rewrite on the server. I also redirected deep files to the same URL without www in front of the domain. Sofar things are working nicely with busy spiders buzzing around as usual and other user-agents seeing what they should as well, but i haven't seen any effect in SERPS yet - neither negative nor positive. It's a bit too early for that but i'm not particulary worried though.
/claus
