http://www.example.com or http://example.com, any difference?

[Oimachi2]

My site shows up with h**p://www.domain.com and h**p://domain.com

One has a PR0 and one has PR3

One has 10 pages indexed MSN with the www. and the one without has 83 pages indexed...

THere is a difference but to what extent?

[edited by: caveman at 5:27 am (utc) on July 12, 2006]

[caveman]

These are technically two different sites, hence the different PR scores. You should make the PR3 version of the site the canonical ("official, authoritative") version, and permanently redirect all pages of the PR0 version to their counterparts at the PR3 version.

Leaving it as it is splits PR/page authority between two different sets of pages (bad), and runs some risk of incurring duplicate penalties.

[Oimachi2]

Thanks Caveman,

I'm furious at my hosting company since I asked them about this 2 months ago and they assured me it didn't make a difference...

They finally fixed the problem today and got rid of the non www. prefixe off my site entirely.

So now I have a google sitemap that has about 700 pages indexed as:

h**p://mydomain.com/a.html
h**p://mydomain.com/b.html
h**p://mydomain.com/c.html
h**p://mydomain.com/d.html

Do I have to redirect the whole site and 700 pages by hand?

The sitemap I have submited is at:

h**p://mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Should I republish it at:

h**p://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

and resubmit to Google?

[edited by: caveman at 5:31 am (utc) on July 11, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] Delinked links [/edit] [/edit][/1]

[caveman]

Hehe, Oimachi2, I understand where you're at. But in a way, getting mad at your host is like getting mad at the local gas station because they told you to buy the wrong car. ;-)

There are certain things that a site owner/webmaster must take ownership of, OR, find a trusted techie/SEO who can take responsibility. Site set up is, IMHO, one of those. Sad, but true.

Here is an example of some code for Apache servers that permanently redirects all pages at a non-www address to a www address:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.examplesite\.com
rewriterule (.*) h**p://www.examplesite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

(I replaced the two t's in http so the link doesn't work; you'll need to replace the *'s with t's. ;-)

That said, if you need ANYTHING other than the basics, I strongly suggest that you head over to the Apache Forum [webmasterworld.com] for guidance on your specific needs, assuming you're using Apache.

[Oimachi2]

Thanks CaveMan,

Why is it that you know more about web administration than any hosting support company guys out there?

It's baffling how much incompetence there is out there...

Cheers!

[Oimachi2]

PS. My tech support guy told me that it's "impossible" to do a site wide redirect and I have to manually add my over 700 redirects manually in Cpanel!...;)

[Oimachi2]

One more thing Caveman,

Now the redirect issue will be fixed, but what about the Google sitemaps?

Should I leave the old sitemap with Google out there without the www. and make a new one with it? So that Google would have 2 sitemaps of my site, one with www. and one without?

Or should I delete my old sitemap with Google and resubmit with the www. suffixe site?

[caveman]

PS. My tech support guy told me that it's "impossible" to do a site wide redirect and I have to manually add my over 700 redirects manually in Cpanel!...;)

Well there are lots of ways to redirect and depending upon the need, sometimes it is necessary to do them individually. But this is not one of those times. Also, I presume you figured this out, but the code above gets dropped into your htaccess file, which is a simple text file at the root level in this case.

As for G maps, you want ALL of the SE's to only be aware of one canonical version of the site, whichever one you've chosen.

While you're at it, make sure that all of your internal links are coded the right way (with or without www, whichever you've chosen), otherwise you'll have an ongoing problem on your hands. And, find out if any external sites linking to you have used the version you don't want. If so, try to get them to change their links. For the most part, the redirect you will put in place will cause the SE's to transfer link authority to the correct versions of the pages, but redirects are not always handled perfectly (or, I should say, as you would like) by the SE's.

[Oimachi2]

Thanks for the info Caveman,

I'll be heading out to the apache forums for more information.

Cheers!