I recently submitted my site and can view stats in my Google webmaster tool... But I did it twice to see which one was correct... But here'e the thing.. My stats only show for http://xxxxxxxxx.xom and the www.xxxxx.com version shows nothing even though it does say it was crawled more recently than the http://xxxx.com account?? and the http://xxxx.com shows errors on one of the links in my blog, but the www.xxx.com version shows no errors in the URL's although it doesn't seem to be gathering any data.... i'm confused.. Why is this and what's the difference, I thought they would just be the same??? McrTech
Yes, they are looked at differently. It is good practice to redirect all traffic from one to the other (xxx.com to www.xxx.com).
The whole concept of redirecting one to the other is to push all Pagerank value and backlink value to once specific URL set. Here is a great example, one site gives a backlink to domain.com and another to www.domain.com; guess what.... those are considered 2 seperate pages and the value is now divided between them. Use the below code in your .htaccess file to do the proper redirection; change yourdomain and the extension to yours. Redirect non-www to www RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Code (markup): Redirect www to non-www RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Code (markup): And no, neither format has more value than the other, it's strictly cosmetic when it comes to which one to choose.
thanks guys.... but now I'm even more confused.... could you possibly show the exact code above, but substitute what you said for this: www.xxxx.com only, so I know exactly what to change... apologies for my ignorance... I onyl ever used free blgos before this domain, and now this..lol... and also, where in my .htaccess do I put this code? Thankyou very much, you guys will get added rep when I figure out how ;-) McrTech
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xxxx\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.xxxx.com/$1 [R=301,L] Code (markup): Anywhere in the .htaccess is fine.
and do I keep the $ and $1 bits in there too? so I pretty much just substitute the xxx.com bits for my domain, yep?... Thankyou very much, you have no idea how much this has been troubling me today... McrTech
Yes, those are variables to redirect all the URLs, they must stay intact or it will not work properly.
www and http without the www are viewed as 2 completely different URL's by the search engines. I wrote an SEO article about this on my SEO blog if you feel like looking it over.