www.domain.com vs domain.com

Sometimes with www, sometimes without

[jeroen9]

I have a website http://mydomain.com with a PageRank of 4. http://www.mydomain.com has a PageRank of 3. I try to get all links linking to http://mydomain.com, so that only this link will be shown in Google.

My problem is that sometimes http://www.mydomain.com is shown in Google and not http://mydomain.com. This has the consequense that my position in Google is very bad sometimes.

Does anybody have a solution?

(Sorry for my possibly bad english, english is not my main language.)

[Nipsy]

Use a 301 redirect on [site.tld...] to point to [site.tld....]

[No5needinput]

In the past mysite.com had a pr of 5 and www.mysite.com a pr3 This was caused by a couple of inbound links using "www" prefix.

The back links for mysite.com showed 83 and www.mysite.com showed 3 backlinks.

Just recently I've noticed that with or without the www my site has a pr5 and the backlinks are exactly the same for both - even the order of the backlinks.

Yet I have done nothing to redirect www and non www.
has Google fixed the www and non www problem?

[jeroen9]

Nipsy, is that also possible with a free freeservers account? I tried it but, but it didn't work.

[Nipsy]

You may be able to ul a .htaccess file with the correct handler (documented numerous other places on ww) for a freeservers account, but only if they're running apache. I have NO IDEA how to do ANYTHING under IIS.

[rogerdp]

If you have Apache with mod_rewrite installed, put this in your topmost .htaccess file to redirect everything from "www.domain" to "domain".

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond "%{HTTP_HOST} %{THE_REQUEST}" "^www\.([^ ]+) [^ ]+ ([^ ]+)" [nocase]
RewriteRule . [%1%2...] [R,L]

[GoogleGuy]

I'd agree with Nipsy. No5needinput, we have put some additional checks in that help some people. I think new canonicalization rules rolling in over the next few weeks should help more sites as well, but glad it's working for you..

[SyntheticUpper]

new canonicalization rules

GG, this sounds interesting. Can you provide more details?

[GoogleGuy]

We rebuild this data every few months and it's getting toward time to rebuild it again. We try to guess for a domain whether domain.com is the same as www.domain.com (it isn't always), so that can help with this issue.

best,
GG

[steveb]

Too bad there isn't a meta tag thingee for a bot to read that could say "my canonical url is www"

[rogerdp]

If such a meta tag existed, how could you trust it? Redirection is the way to go.

What domains have different sites at 'www.domain' and 'domain'?

[No5needinput]

Thanks GG.

Any chance of you being able to tell us if the pr from the non www domain or visa versa, is passed onto and added to the listed site?

[plumsauce]

We rebuild this data every few months and it's getting toward time to rebuild it again.

kinda slow, no?

We try to guess for a domain whether domain.com is the same as www.domain.com (it isn't always), so that can help with this issue.

dns, dns, dns

if a site has it properly set up, then they should
not have to worry. if they are too lame to get it
right, then let *them* suffer. Not the other way
around.

yeah, I know, like a broken record ...

+++

[rogerdp]

plumsauce: Two things,

1) Given how many pages Google indexes, a COMPLETE update of a LIVE database seems astonishingly fast if it can be done in a few months.

2) What does DNS have to do with virtual/shared hosting?

[bignet]

Too bad there isn't a meta tag thingee for a bot to read that could say "my canonical url is www"

robots.txt can do just that if you know about dns and webservers, but even that is not needed to avoid such problems created by users

[g1smd]

>> We rebuild this data every few months and it's getting toward time to rebuild it again. <<

Ah, that explains a feature I have seen where www.domain.com and www.domain.net had both separate PR and separate listed backlinks for the first 6 months that the site existed, then suddenly one day the PR and link list were identical for both, and have remained that way ever since.

>> Too bad there isn't a meta tag thingee for a bot to read that could say "my canonical url is www". <<

No meta tag, but there is a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file for Apache (or the equivalent for IIS) to do just this. That one liner can be used to redirect on a file-by-file basis, or for a whole domain at once.

[surfgatinho]

I'm sure this has been mentioned but I couldn't find where it started and what the relevance is.
Anyway, if I enter my keywords my site is on about page 5. If I append -www the ste comes up number 2.
I regard the site address as being mydomain.com, i.e. no www. Is this all related or should I be barking up another tree?