I'm a little shocked..There is one website in particular that I have been working on for a short while now. I have spent all of my time building backlinks using the www in my domain (example: http://www.domain.com) But for some reason, google has only indexed about 90 of my pages for my site using the www in it. It doesn't even show the main page as indexed with the www! Yet, for some odd reason I have over 490 pages indexed in the non-www version (example: http://domain.com) This is truly strange. Can anyone confirm if this will effect rankings? Considering all of my backlinks are pointing to URLs with www in them, and some of these pages aren't even coming up as indexed..
I would set up a 301-redirect to the version you have built links to. Best to set that 301 redirect up right away to stop this from happening. It happened on one of my sites too. Google just sees the www version as a separate site from the non-www version. Make sure you are building links to internal pages too, not just the main www site URL. This is rather un-specific instructions though for better instructions let us know the address of your site
Really good tip there Brad! I have been building links to a variety of internal pages as well. Although probably 70% are towards the homepage, the other 30% is scattered amongst inner pages. I'm going to setup the redirect now. Also, I will PM you the address. Thanks!
Checkout you internal link wheel. if your pages are connected tight to main category/main pages then it would likely not happen. Also make sure that you have canonical url relation for all your URLs.
Yea, this is the first thing I thought about. I remember when my partner was first setting up the site-map he had actually hard-coded the non-www version. But, I went in and updated this a little over a month ago. Google has been to my site many times since then. This has been the only place I noticed anything hard-coded. Thanks for the suggestion I will be sure to re-check my inner links some more.
Setup 301 and also tell google about your preferred domain name (with google webmaster tools). This is a common problem and has easy solution. !
Better solve canonical issues of your website urls and these issues would be fixed itself. Do 301 of either your www urls to non www urls or non www urls to www urls. Also make sure to redirect your index page to your main domain.