This is weird. I recently did a total layout change on one of my sites. I did a check right now, and domain.com shows a cache date of June 8, with the old layout. But www.domain.com shows a cache date of June 17 and the new layout. I always thought that google treated domain and www.domain as the same site.
A site can't have duplicate content... pages can. And pages aren't "booted out" for duplicate content -- they're just discounted/filtered. So if there is a duplicate content issue with the www and the no www versions, I'd expect to see it applied at the page level, where a given page would show up for one but not both URLs. It seems to be the case that in time, Google and other SEs will usually recognize http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com as the same site/page.
Minstrel: this should never happen. the two urls are different 'A' records in the DNS and can actually point to completely different servers. The SE's must NEVER treat the two as the same url.
How can http://www.somesite.com and http://somesite.com point to completely different servers? I'm no server guru, not by any means, but that doesn't seem right to me...
They can resolve to different IP addresses and/or websites if you wanted. Although rarely are they actually setup like that. www is no different than any other sub-domain, so it's just like forums.digitalpoint.com is not the same thing as digitalpoint.com or www.digitalpoint.com.
I realize that. But in almost all, if not all, cases, the content for http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com will be identical and eventually they will be seen as such and treated in SEs as a single URL -- and correctly so. At least, this certainly used to be true, unless Google et al. have started doing something differently.
Not sure... it was my understanding that they never were treated as a single URL (since from a technical standpoint it's not a single URL, rather a URL with duplicate content).
*shrug* I'm basing my conclusions on observations over time that, while initially for new sites you will often see different SE results, different PR, etc., for domain.com vs. www.domain.com, after a while they converged.
Interesting find Fryman! Without hijacking the thread, I have the same problem in that even though the link to my forum is www.domain.com/forum when you click on the link it changes it to domain.com/forum. Could be a potentially stupid arse question but why is it doing that? The forum is PhpBB if that helps. Darren
I don't think it's anything to do with being a phpBB forum. You must have (maybe unintentionally) a redirect or mod rewrite in there somewhere, Darren... I can't think of any other way for that to happen (I assume you're talking about the forum site in your sig. right?). Addendum More data suggesting a perhaps malformed mod rewrite or redirect: http://www.travel-rants.com/forum "redirects" to http://travel-rants.com/forum/ but http://www.travel-rants.com/forum/ does not redirect.
Minstrel - I know why you were voted DP's favourite person! Cheers mate, will look at the .htaccess file - I used an SEO "patch", which did the trick, but it must have something in it to redirect my URL... never thought about that doh! Darren
I think what you see Minstrel is that over time, the SE's decide that one of the urls are (if you like) primary and the other is simply a dup. So you stop seeing results from the dup. However, as shaun points out. www.domain.com is simply yet another subdomain of domain.com just like forums. and ftp. and mail. etc etc are. There are very few people that ever use a different IP for the top domain nowadays though. I've done it in the past where I had no way of redirecting the non www on a specific server, so I simply pointed the non www to my server at home and 301'd it there.