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Most external links go to www.xyzdomain.com, although of course Google returns the same number for a "link:" search either with or without the "www". A handful of links point to to the xyzdomain.com version; these aren't from link partners, but rather unsolicited links on doorway-looking pages stuffed with links. I can't imagine these few low-PR pages are overpowering the great mass of higher quality linkage pointed at www.xyzdomain.com.
Internally, most links are coded with the absolute "www.xyzdomain.com" although some links in the site's online catalog may use relative references.
I can't really figure out why Google prefers the xyzdomain.com pages. I also can't figure out if this is a problem, but I'd prefer that this ambiguity didn't exist. Both versions seem to return a 200 OK server header.
Does your experience suggest that this situation could affect the site's position in the SERPs? If so, what's the best way of correcting it without causing major traffic loss going into the holiday season?
Make anything under the ".xyzdomain.com" redirect (301 permamently) to "www.xyzdomain.com" and you're done! :)
<added>
.htaccess rewrite rule:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xyzdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [xyzdomain.com...] [R=301,L]
</added>
Any!? ;) Seriously, i don't know. Is it running apache?
>issue this site is experiencing likely to be a problem from an SE issue
Normaly google is pretty good in detecting and merging duplicates but other se's might mess with it. I have some problems with fast that still lists one my sites with www allthough it's proper redirecting to the non-www host since at least a year. So i wouldn't wait too long.
I don't know the reason, but basically the same thing happened to me around the end of June.
I had used mydomain.com as my start-page for years when all of a sudden my backlinks dropped by 90% overnight. I added "www." to mydomain.com and all backlinks were back in place.
Even to this day I have a 90% difference between www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com.
What's funny is that I distinctly remember checking this several times over the years and there was never a difference for me between "www." and non-"www."
Yidaki, it's running IIS, not Apache.
Nope. Since it happened, the ratio has stayed about the same: mydomain has approximately 10% of www.mydomain's backlinks.
And get this: www.mydomain is a PR6, mydomain is a PR5!
It's all very strange to me, but serps have actually improved, so I'm not complaining.
You might check this thread: IIS rewrite / mod rewrite for IIS and asp [webmasterworld.com]
I wouldn't puzzle too much about if google always merges or just sometimes. Having both hosts (example.com and www.example.com) returning 200 and the same content is a bad idea. Redirecting (301) is definitely the best and the safest way.
It's hard to understand the difference between JK's situation and my site - I see identical backlinks and PR (but different pages indexed), while JK sees different backlinks and even different PR. How does Google decide whether the www.domain.com and domain.com are the same or different?
I always thought Google viewed both as the same thing, which they obviously are.
Again, this shift only happened to me at the end of [actually, 8/31/03 - I just checked]. One day backlinks were normal; the next morning they had changed.
It has to be something on Google's end that changed, because my ISP didn't change anything; DNS didn't change; my site didn't change...
