Indexed Twice in Google

www.example.com and example.com

[jbcobbs]

My site is indexed twicec in google- one as www.widget.com and one as widget.com - www.widget.com is inexed in dmoz and has better placement, widget.com does not. In past months both would show up at random upon searching google. Now only the widget.com one shows up. How do I get my www.widget.com back?

[g1smd]

Use a 301 Moved Permanently redirect on the server to divert all non-www traffic over to the www URL.

There are many previous posts in this forum, explaining how to do that.

Make sure that all incoming links are to the www version too.

[jbcobbs]

thank you- as i said my site was showing up in google at random previously on google with the www.widget.com always placing much higher, also it is listed in dmoz as www.widget.com. In the last few weeks, the www.widget.com is not showing up at all. If I initiate the redirect will google start showing the www.widget.com again or is there a possibility of nothing showing up?

[dotme]

I was wondering, since the thread of this topic seems relevent to my situation, if someone can help me understand this...

Both
www.mydomain.com AND
www.mydomain.com/default.asp

are indexed in Google. Of course, they are the same page. I doubt I'm getting penalized for that, but I keep reading that Google may lower rankings for sites with duplicate content. Should I be worried?

[g1smd]

>> If I initiate the redirect will google start showing the www.widget.com again or is there a possibility of nothing showing up? <<

At the moment, Google thinks that www and non-www are two separate sites showing the same content, so it drops one of them. Unfortunately for you, it dropped the "wrong" one. If you use a 301 redirect then the one you want listed will be displayed again, and the other will disappear. It will take about 4 to 8 weeks for Google to correct the listings though. Make sure that all incoming links are to one version of the URL (preferably the one with the www in it). If you take no action then things will only get worse than they are now.

.

>> www.mydomain.com AND www.mydomain.com/default.asp <<

Make sure you have either a 301 redirect from / to /default.asp or that you make sure that all links (internal and external) point to the server root only. The latter is preferred.

.

See also: [webmasterworld.com...]

[dotme]

Thanks for the reply... I was beginning to think I might have stumped everyone. I will change internal links from default.asp to the root.

Cheers

[jbcobbs]

Ive tried to do the redirect in this format- Redirect 301 /index.php [widget.com...] - its not working. Am I doing this wrong?

[jbcobbs]

I believe its just looping- in all actuality i guess i have its redirecting to itself so that makes sense. So then if the format is "redirect 301 /filename [widget.com"...] then how do i specify that the filename is [widget.com?...]

[jbcobbs]

i found doing this would do the trick:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [yourdomain.com...] [R=permanent,L]

I did it and it worked. Is this going to solve my google problem in the long run or do i still need to figure out the 301 redirect?

[my3cents]

I found that for the past two days my index page is in twice, but one of the url's does not and has not ever existed, nor does any page or website link to it. example:

search for any of our keyphrases and you see two listings for the same page:

www.website.com

and www.website.com/+keyword1%20keyword2

I spent the entire day checking through my site looking for a link like this as well as checking all of my backlinks and nowhere is there a link to this url. All of my listings were showing this strange url, no matter the keyword, it always showed our +primary%20phrase after the "/"

I suppose it's nice having a double listing as far as occupying two spots (no drop), but I am uneasy about what effects it will have as far as duplicate content and/or dropped rankings.

btw: I have had no bad effects from florida, very clean and stable PR7 static html site of about 300 mostly text pages of informative content all related to environmental issues that has been top 5 for dozens of popular phrases for 1-2 years (except during dominic).

I have also noticed a few really strange urls indexed that trigger some websites 404 redirects. Any ideas why G is indexing the same page twice and now indexing non-existent urls? I thought for a while that some of these sites had some strange way of adding the search phrase to their url, but now it looks like Google is adding it in on their own.

my3cents

[kaled]

Of course, this raises the question of can a competitor hurt you by adding links?

If you have carefully managed to ensure that all backlinks include the www. prefix all a competitor has to do is to add a few backlinks to your site omitting the www. prefix

This is not guaranteed to do harm, but it's very easy to do so a vindictive person might try it.

GG, would you care to comment.

Kaled.