Duplicate listings - With & Without WWW

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=acnesprayaway&hl=en&lr=&filter=0

I noticed that there are duplicate results for the above query (same pages from same site).. The only difference being that some listings have the WWW on the front, whilst others dont.

Whats going on here? Could have a bad effect if not fixed? How can it be fixed?

 

What's happening is that Google is interpreting www.site.com and site.com as 2 different websites hence listing duplicate listings. Choose only one domain, either www.site.com or site.com and promote only one of it. Things will be back to normal once the search engines see that you're giving more importance on a particular domain set and will discard the other.

Hold the breast

 

Thanks for your reply mistress. So I should not worry about any issues of dulpication and just focus on building links with one version and stick to it?

 

Absolutely my love, you've heard me right

 

It's a know problem with G

Most likely you linked yourself to both versions www and non www or someone linking to you did not use the www or non www.

To solve this for G best to use a mod_rewrite resulting in a
301 redirect from non to www or the other way round.

A 301 redirect will avoid or eliminate duplicate penalties, transfer links and pr etc.

If you need help with this do a search here for mod_rewrite

Best of luck
Expat

 

Place the above code into your .htaccess file if you want to remove the www from your URL address. If you want to redirect all pages to HAVE the "www" reverse the URL's above. Please, remember to change your-comain.name.com to your real URL address.

 

Hi Markhutch,

Thanks. Is that code a mod-rewrite resulting in a 301 redirect?

 

Yes, that's what it does.

 

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^my-domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.my-domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

is that right????????

 

not entirely special chars (e.g. dots) need escape

 

thanks a bunch.......... ill use that code u quoted...

 

whats with the slash in the funny location? my-domain\.com

 

See above

 

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

what about that - saw it on a different site without the first line: [Options +FollowSymLinks]?

 

'Options +FollowSymLinks' is needed in some cases depending on your Apache configuration. Leaving it in won't do any harm, removing it might. Just keep it

 

Anyone good a good code for moving ALL sub domains to the root index.html page. Just in case someone wants to get rid of subs and go with pure results.

 

To redirect all subdomains to the actual domain (though I'm not entirely sure why you'd like to do that), just use the same mod_rewrite code posted earlier in this thread, except that you need to replace the RewriteCond line as follows:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[^.]+\.domain\.com$ [NC]

 

Thank you, Willy.