Another WWW vs no-WWW topic - can't see distinction in search results

I am about to implement a 301 permanent redirect and in choosing which version of the URL to use (www vs no-www) I noticed that both Yahoo site explorer and Google, upon listing links to the site, do not seem to distinguish between the two. When I search for links to bluewidgets.com I get the same number of results as when I search for links to www.bluewidgets.com.

I thought the two versions of the URL were meant to be totally different and therefore show up as different URLs in search results and have the chance of having 2 different page ranks, so why are the results identical?

 

Do you mean use :

links: www.bluewidgets.com ?

Code (markup):

If so, yes, it's different result with and without www, also with http.

Result of links is get a text with the specific www or http from all crawled web by google.

 

A canonical URL issue will not show directly when doing a link command.

However the problem is by resolving to two different domains www or without www the site in question appears as two different sites to the search engines.

Additionally when this issue occurs your PageRank becomes diluted since the inbound links will be different between the two versions.

You should always have the domain resolve to the absolute URL

for best results.

 

If you have canonical issues (i.e. you allow www AND non-www references to your pages) then you don't necessarily have duplicate content and split rank issues... YET! But you likely will.

For example, if your site is new, has no inbound links, and you submit a sitemap.xml with ALL www versions of your URLs the SITE:example.com and SITE:www.example.com will show the same number of results. It is not until someone links to your site with the non-www version of a URL that your site will get indexed using the non-www versions and will create the duplicate content and split page rank issues.

SITE:example.com will show all pages indexed for the domain example.com (i.e. it includes pages from ALL subdomains as well as the www and non-www versions of their URLs). SITE:www.example.com will show all pages indexed for the www subdomain ONLY.

For example, search Google for site:discoversouthcarolina.com. Note the number of pages indexed AND all the various subdomains in the results. Now search Google for site:www.discoversouthcarolina.com. Note that fewer pages are indexed when you narrow the search for www only AND that www is the ONLY domain returned.

You need to 301 to a canonical URL (either www or non-www). Doesn't matter which you pick, just be consistent and enforce it site wide using something like Mod Rewrite.

 

Thanks, Canonical, but the site I'm talking about does have links pointing to both versions of the URL on external sites and it is a fairly old PR 4 site and site:example.com and site:www.example.com also show the same results

 

Im so glad i read this, just launched a brand new site, no links to it at all and i allow ww w. and non-ww w. - change it shall I!

 

If you place a 301 redirect, there is no difference in SEO terms. It does not matter if you redirect to www or non www the link juice you receive will be redirected to the choosen version too.

 

Monfis, I understand that, but that wasn't really what I was wondering about. There is no 301 redirect on the site - if you go to www.site.com it does not redirect to site.com and vice versa and no canonical URL tag is used. What I'm saying is that despite this, there still seems to be no difference in stats (backlinks, number of pages indexed, PR, etc.) no matter which version of the URL I checked - none whatsoever. This is what's confusing me.

 

I cant speak for Yahoo or Live but I think Google as absolved the www attribute. Their indexing considers your site one and the same. I've changed my sites indexing pattern though Google's webmaster tools to only index the http;//example.com form. The other search engines are or will probably follow Googles example and cease utilizing the www in future results.





ROOFIS

 

when i try indexing the only www.example.com, webmaster tools ask me to prove the ownership again, but i have the same files on the same root directories, how to get rid from this situation ?