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example.com has a pr4, but www.example.com has pr6, how does it come this way? what is the difference?
thanks for your input
alexandra
[edited by: ciml at 2:05 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified URL. [/edit]
The PR is split which will be damaging both. If it's your site, I'd set up 301s which will consolidate your PR to whichever you consider your lead URL to be. It may take a few months for SEs to unravel what pages they have in their index but this is your long-term solution.
If it's your competitors site you're laughing.
Apparently Google sees my site as two sites and imposes a duplicate content penalty. There have been many threads on this forum about this over the last few months but Google have not done anything about it. Perhaps they don't know how, but this is definitely their problem. As far as I know they have not yet commented or replied on this despite many people complaining to them. I don't think Googleguy has commented either.
Quite honestly this situation is ridiculous. You would have thought that the boffs at the Googleplex could have fixed something as obvious as this before now. The only thing we can do is to keep highlighting the issue until someone over there takes note. Please contact them about this (as should everyone else who has the same problem.) You can do so at help@Google.com.
Googleguy, any chance of a comment on this? Pleeeease?
If you set up 301 Moved Permanently redirect in your server headers your situation will resolve itself over time. It's nothing to do with Google.
Simply put: domain.com is a different site to www.domain.com, and different again to subdomain.domain.com and again to somethingelse.domain.com
You can fix it with a 301 redirect, and make sure all incoming links go to the www version.
WRT your statement that an incoming link "that you never requested" caused your problem, wasn't the Internet built on links? And has it not always been the case that these are freely created without requesting permission? Assuming that you agree to this basic principle of the Internet how come it's nothing to do with Google?
We can safely assume that Google agree that it's OK to link to sites without asking permission. They have probably done it couple of squadrillion times now. Should they not then be providing safeguards to stop this duplicate content situation arising?
You are correct in saying that there will be a technical reason for it happening. However I know that I use a reputable hosting company (largest in Europe), with a normal domain name and no spamming techniques. How can this be my fault or the fault of anyone who links to my site?
There is nothing for Google to fix.
indeed - read about DNS - but i would not offer a site @ example.org to force everyone to use/link to www.example.org
Does anyone know what I could do about it?
Help really appreciated
Regards
Rod
I have now successfully installed a 301 on my site. Do you have any information on how long it takes for Google to catch up with this? My site has PR5 and it is in DMOZ. Also, is there anything else that can be done to speed the process?
(I have also stickied you on this.)
If you're lucky, the stack might be cleared shortly after the 301 is in place. If you're unlucky, you might be looking at weeks of watching your pages disappear.
(why Google sees a new permanent redirect as an instruction to stop indexing that page is a complete mystery - Google's index is full of accidental dupe not-www and www pages. It should let them coexist temporarily in cases where a webmaster is trying to resolve this issue)
I eventually chickened out and had the 301 removed, the missing sites pages, with the still incorrect not-www, were back in the index within hours. It's a Google problem, and deserves fixing (would also remove some load from their index!)
I appreciate that not-www and www are technically different sites, but Google needs to address this issue, it has been going on for years, it can't be that complicated :)
RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent]
By the way, one of my sites suffered from the same double-indexing / split-page-rank problem described above, and after implementing the code above in my .htaccess, I believe it took several weeks for things to shake out decently (and in the meantime, many, if not all, of my pages seemed to fall out of the SERPS!)
Patience, patience... ;)
My site (pr6) was considered a pro0 site after google suddently started to index it without www.
Fortunately, the above htaccess fix worked, and google isn't visiting anymore the non www. page. However, it is going to take weeks (months?) for my site to come back where it was in the search results. Several months of work to get the site indexed properly were thrown away with this problem.
Brakkar
Does anyone here know how to resolve this issue on a IIs server where the ISP does not allow .htaccess? (they may be fast but they are not very helpful).
I've just been checking through my logs and Googlebot is only visiting the www version but all he/she does is pick up the robots.txt file and my index file. It does not crawl into the site anymore :( Should I worry about this? Can I do anything about it?
By the way does Googlebot hit everyones pages twice simultaneously or are my logs getting over excited?
Best wishes
Sid
Sorry to chime in again but...
My site in question uses (used just changed it) relative paths to pages. I guess that the change I've just made to absolute URLs may help the situation and will report back in a few weeks.
Any comments on this problem and absolute/relative URLs?
Best wishes
Sid
I don't know much about this myself but you could try this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com [NC]
Quite honestly this situation is ridiculous. You would have thought that the boffs at the Googleplex could have fixed something as obvious as this before now. The only thing we can do is to keep highlighting the issue until someone over there takes note. Please contact them about this (as should everyone else who has the same problem.) You can do so at help@Google.com.
exactly
or at least they should buy a copy of
DNS&BIND for the reference library
better yet, they should actually read it.
I was severly hit by this problem also. I think this is a major issue. There is NO reason for google to treat a site without www. different than with www.
Yes there is. example.com is a sub-domain of www.example.com. You can have totally different content residing at both. Unfortunately many do not know this and therefore the search engines have to somehow take this into consideration and figure it out for themselves. I think in Google's case, it takes a few months to sort it all out.
One way to help the search engines is to permanently redirect (301) the version you don't want to use to the version you do want to use.
[edited by: pageoneresults at 8:43 pm (utc) on Feb. 18, 2004]
The real problem here is that many hosting services set up the "default" DNS so that both domain variants point to the same "account", thus setting up the account holder for these problems. I suspect this is done so that they don't have to ask (and explain the implications of), "Do you want to use the www subdomain, only the root domain, or both?" when signing up new customers. They just "dumb down" the process, set up both domain variants with A records, and keep mum on the subject.
So, if your site does resolve at both domain variants, then it's incumbent upon you to handle things correctly.
Sorry if I've interrupted a "Let's kick Google" party, but it's up to us as webmasters to build, then test, then deploy, and then test again [webmasterworld.com].
Does your site return 200-OK for all domain variants, or does it 301 redirect the "alternate domains"?
Are the Cache-Control, Expires, and Last-Modified headers present and correct for each requested resource?
Leave nothing to chance!
You can fix the problem at hand by deleting the A record(s) for unwanted domain(s), or by redirecting the variant domains to the main one. If you have established links, the 301 method is preferred to retain the PageRank from those links.
Jim
better yet, they should actually read about DNS
To realise that example.org is a subdomain of org, and www.example.org is as well a subdomain of subdomain example.org
Now who thinks all .com sub-domains are the same, thankfully G et al do not
A if .www and no/.www are both indexed, with .www indexed first with pr6, then what is the logic, in considering no./www PR0 to be the main index of the site, and remove and ignore totally .www pr6? If .www is indexed first, then in NO WAY, should it be removed when the SE suddently is aware of no/.www pr0 if the content is identical.
My site, who is a very hot ressource, was missed by MANY people since it disapeared from the 3rd position to over 500th. I guess there are MANY interesting content I miss when I search google for this issue. Its not just about our own sites. Its about relevence of results.
Brakkar
Google have just recently it seems altered their algo to adjust for all the subdomain spam that was flooding their results. Perhaps there is a connection.
I don't think so. This has been an ongoing issue for quite some time.
If .www is indexed first, then in NO WAY, should it be removed when the SE suddently is aware of no/.www pr0 if the content is identical.
Depends. Is it possible that a competitor found the oversight and then decided to link to your non www version to wreak a little havoc on your www positions?
As I stated above, I believe it takes Google a couple of good crawls to determine that there is no sub-domain. I've watched this closely over the past year or so and eventually everything falls in place.
It is to your advantage to make sure that you've covered all your bases when setting up a site. Part of that means checking your 301s and 404s. Make sure your 404s are not returning 200s and make sure your 301s are permanently redirecting to the proper resource.
Brakkar
