Hope somebody can help me understand what is going on with this: FYI: insertnameofwebsite.com is a made up name to protect the real client... Here is the problem with google indexing the site: Within a client's wordpress settings he has it set to http://[I]insertnameofwebsite[/I].com His actual files are http://[I]insertnameofwebsite.com/category/whatever[/I] When I went to google to upload a sitemap.... google automatically assumes his domain would start off like this: http://[I]www.insertnameofwebsite[/I].com I just assumed that google would still be able to find all the links...theres atleast 30 (9 from the root alone.) Well, it didnt... all it indexed was: http://[I]insertnameofwebsite[/I].com and http://[I]insertnameofwebsite.com/category/whatever[/I] No other links listed... So wait something's wrong right? I type in http://[I]www.insertnameofwebsite[/I].com into google to get to his website... and it automatically changes back to http://[I]insertnameofwebsite[/I].com So if I go into wordpress and change both general settings to: http://[I]www.insertnameofwebsite[/I].com http://[I]www.insertnameofwebsite.com/category/whatever[/I] Will this correct the issue and find all the links properly?
GetFirstPageSEO, you need to login to google to specify your preferred domain: (www or non-www) 1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want. 2. Under Site configuration, click Settings. 3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want. You may need to reverify ownership of your sites. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you've removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you'll need to repeat the verification steps. Hopefully that helps or gets you going in the right direction. -BlastFree
That is fantastic BlastFree! You hit it right no the head however I would like to add to your information provided. If we could only spread the word and knowledge. I would like to add the reason for using www or non-www. In the server and DNS world of the localhost. The name of the localhost device has to be defined for each domain. A domain with out the www (non-www) give you no more then a domain that has no defined host but only a canonical value set to ^.domain.com (absolute value or defined point). When using the www as a defined hostname your DNS resolves as hostname.domain.com. What you might call a sub-domain. Until you define your domain as a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) you can not add a sub- domain in front of your domain because it has no defined host. This goes a lot deeper then this but I think you may see a little better how it works. One of the biggest mistake people have made in this process in not to have a fully qualified domain and add a directory behind the domain loaded up with a zillion landing pages in the directory. Then they spend a endless amount of time trying to figure out why their pages are not getting indexed. Until your domain is a FQDN these pages will never get indexed because the directory is not define as absolute in value. This may help...