so i got a site that is listed as zzzzz.com and www.zzzzz.com and they rank different in google webmaster tools under the exact same search term....why is this??? how do i correct??? (thats not the actual domain) please help...sorry for the n00b question
What you're describing is a result of URL canonicalization issues. Search engines rank unique URLs. The www and non-www version of a URL are seen as different web pages... and can have different Page Rank... and rank differently in the SERPs for different keyword phrases. Every page on your site should have a single canonical ("preferred") URL that you use to render the page. You solve this problem by 301 redirecting all non-canonical URLs for the page to the canonical URL. This eliminates all of the duplicate content issues and split page rank/link juice problems you're seeing that result from canonicalization issues.
This is basically a URL canonicalization problem. Google read www url and non www url as two different domains, and there ranking differs on the basis of back links to www and non www. So the domain having more good quality link back will get higher position and other will get lower position. To solve this issue i will suggest you to redirect your lower link back domain to high link back domain. You can do it by 301 redirect. in this way your all the links will link to one single domain and that will get a good position in Search Engines.
If you want the www version of your URLs to be the canonical form then you can use something like the following in the .htaccess in the root folder of your web: If you want the non-www version of your URLs to be the canonical form then you can use something like the following in the .htaccess in the root folder of your web: To test, simply update the .htaccess in the root folder of your web (I would suggest putting this at the bottom of the .htaccess since it is a general rule and have redirects for specific URLs at the top) with the appropriate rule above and then test it in a browser. If you chose www as your canonical form then request http://example.com and see if you're sent to http://www.example.com/. Request http://example.com/somefolder/somepage.html and see if you're sent to http://www.example.com/somefolder/somepage.html. You can use this HTTP Header Tool to view the browser server interaction and see whether a 301 is happening. In the case where you expect a redirect, you should see that the original request for a non-canonical URL returns a 301 HTTP status with a Location value pointing to the canonical. It should then request the canonical URL and return a 200 HTTP status.