My site can be accessed both with and without the www but naturally, the links are getting created with the www in the first. Now, two questions -Is this OK? Will this affect my ranking in the future -Is it a good practice to have the www subdomain in front or it does not really make a difference? Thanks
I believe it is extremely important to resolve this "canonicalization" issue, as it can lead not only to link splitting, but deindexing of the preferred domains, since Google will regard each as a different page and therefore duplicate content. In addition to setting my preference in webmaster tools, I also use this mod_rewrite in .htaccess (Apache server): RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]*/)*index\.html? [NC] RewriteRule ^(([^/]*/)*)index\.html?$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L] This addresses several canonicalization issues, including index.html and non-www versions.
Hi amanamission , thanks for the reply Just so that i am clear on my part...what you said will make all the urls WITH WWW and you mean to say that urls with www are preferred right?
I don't think that Google will regard URLs that start with "www." and without the "www." as duplicate pages. Come on. The Google Algo is smarter than that and knows that most websites can be accessed with the "www" and without "www" and it is NOT a duplicate content issue.
amanamission is right in everything except i dont recommend touching the prefered domain in Googles Webmaster Tools. Just use .htaccess to 301 them to the one version.
Hey there, You should really look into the Google Webmaster tools. Just do a google search for "webmaster" and you will find them. There is a tool on there where you can set your preferred domain name. For instance, I have all lukebouman.com links set to www.lukebouman.com in their index. Well, it is going to be anyway as I just set this about a week ago. In their documentation, this says it helps google determine page rank more accurately. They probably transfer PR from the lukebouman.com site to www.lukebouman.com. I do not know if that is true or not but that is what I would assume. Check it out. Sincerely, Travis Walters
This is absolutely untrue. A simple test will do...on many websites, check the www against non. One version will show PR, and the other won't, unless they have done a redirection. About Webmaster Tools...no evidence really that this helps, but my gut tells me that bots do observe this. I can't tell, since as I mentioned I use .htaccess and cover all the bases. The "index" one is a major deal, at first I thought I had to use it in URL's so the initial burst of links went to that address.
Yes that's true, some even have PR5 for www and PR3 for non www for example and the reason for this is Apache can display different pages for: www.example.com example.com/ www.example.com/index.html example.com/home.asp The way Google handles it is they choose the version with the "most authority" as the primary URL, just like they do with duplicate content. brotherZ, Matt "the man" Cutts even spoke about this and said the same things we are so it might be worth a read.