Actually I am a seo freelancer, I was doing a small research and I found out that some sites are having different PRs and different listing in search engines, Like for eg. take any site: http://www.anysite.com and http://anysite.com, both were having different PRs, and lets say I searched for abcd on google and got a result : http://abcd.com not http://www.abcd.com so, can anyone tell me why this happens and which link is more important with www or without www? Does www in the link really matters? Thanx!
Google considers both the websites as two different websites, its really kinda weird. That is the reason both of them have different PR and different SERP.
It can certainly matter. If you are hosting the sites on a linux box simply create a .htaccess file and add the following code to correct the issue (I used my domain as an example):
the problem is one of canonicalisation. You need to fix this, it can cause problems with Google, I've seen sites getting penalised for this. If you're using a CPanel host, this can be done simply by forwarding the http://domain to the http://www.domain
This is the most basic of SEO problems. It is the first thing that every SEO should tackle for their site as it leads to other problems that will limit your ability to rank well. Which would lead me to question why if you are an "SEO freelancer" as you say that you do not already have an excellent understanding of the problem itself, why it is bad, and how to fix it... But whatever... I'll explain it again here for the 100th time at least. LOL Google and the other engines rank URLs. They don't rank sites... they don't even rank web pages. Every unique URL is considered by the search engines to be a different 'page' in their index. Most sites out there not professionally SEO'd have canonical issues because they are not aware of this fact. And half of the so called SEOs out there don't even understand it. Every 'page' on your site should have one and ONLY one URL. This is called the canonical URL or preferred URL. For example, http://example.com/ http://example.com/index.html http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.html might all be URLs for your home page. Google and the other engines see these as 4 different 'pages' because each has a different URL. This leads to a couple of problems that affect your rankings for particular keyword phrases - 1) duplicate content and 2) split page rank/link juice. It leads to duplicate content because your site serves up the exact same content (your home page) under all 4 URLs. So one of the 4 URLs (you have no way of knowing which) gets flagged as the original version of the content and the other 3 get flagged as duplicate. For the 3 duplicate versions of the home page, all ranking factors that are based on the content of the page are devalued in the ranking algorithm. Since Google sees them as 4 different pages, if they each have 10 inbound links from 10 different sites then what you have is 4 URLs with 10 inbound links each. The way to fix this is to decide on some rules of how to determine which URL is the canonical or preferred URL. This usually means making decisions like: - www vs non-www - show trailing '/' when referencing folders w/ default documents or hide the trailing '/' - show default document filename when referencing folders w/ default documents or hide the default document name - if you support https as well then which pages should be https and which should be http (don't allow a single page to get indexed as both) It doesn't matter which rules you decide on for constructing canonical URLs as long as you decide on the rules and enforce them across your site w/ 301 redirects. I always choose www, show trailing '/', and hide default document name. So my preferred canonical URL in the above example would be http://www.example.com/ but that is just my preference. To fix the canonical issues you simply redirect all other non-canonical URLs to the canonical URL similar to the following: http://example.com/ --> 301 redirect --> http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/index.html --> 301 redirect --> http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/ Canonical URL No Redirect Required http://www.example.com/index.html --> 301 redirect --> http://www.example.com/ Now Google will give your canonical URL credit for all inbound links to the other 3 URLs as well as giving it credit for the link text used to link to the other 3 non-canonical URLs. This means the PR will be passed from the other 3 non-canonical URLs to the canonical. The redirects also cause the other 3 non-canonical URLs to drop out of the index. So now Google sees your home page http://www.example.com/ as a single URL with 40 inbound links instead of 4 different URLs with 10 links each. This eliminates duplicate content issues on your site and split page rank. Your home page will gain some PR because it's getting credit for 4 times as many inbound links and hopefully because of the additional links w/ relevant link text it will rank better for the terms other sites are using in the links. It now has 4 times as many link texts to be considered for keyword rankings in the SERPs and 4 times as many potentially relevant refering pages to be considered.
Google will NEVER penalize your site or URL for this. Your rankings will likely suffer and your site's page rank will not typically be as high as it could have been, but it has nothing to do with Google imposing a penalty on the site or URL. Penalties are imposed when Google determines a site is doing something that violates Google's Webmaster Guildelines (i.e. when they are caught doing something more black hat). You'll want to do this using Mod Rewrite if you want to fix all of your canonical issues... like those associated with showing default document names in the URL vs. hiding default document names. I would suggest reading the previous post for details on how to fix this properly. Just to be complete you should also set the Dashboard -> Settings -> Preferred Domain setting in Googles Webmaster Tools to whichever you prefer as well.
That is why it is very important to use the same url when linking back to your websites. In fact your SEO efforts will reduced due to this fact. I think there is an attribute or a meta tag that you can place the top of your page so the search engines will not considers the urls as different. I don't know much about this yet cos i didn't think i needed it. I link to all my sites with the same url.
Thanks to all for the information... @Canonical, I dont have much knowledge about how to redirect, I dont have knowledge of .htacess, can I understood this part: But I dont know how to do this, can you please tell me that how to do this? Kind Regards...!
The HTML element you're talking about is the <link rel="canonical" href="YourPagesCanonicalURL">. But this element does not provide all of the benefits that using 301 redirects to fix canonical issues will provide you. Even Matt Cutts has said this <link rel="canonical"> element should be used basically as a last resort. This element was added recently by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN to help pure HTML sites (those NOT using server side scripting languages), sites that don't have access to Mod Rewrite, or very complex sites like huge ecommerce sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs where using Mod Rewrite to fix all problems would be very complex. I would strongly suggest that if you are running on an Apache based web server that you investigate Mod Rewrite and correct your issues w/ 301 redirects, not <link rel="canonical">.
Hey mate I just did that for http://www.photoshopstuff.info but I still cant c the change...! Please let me know the problem :| Thanx!