Calling All SEO's - Non - WWW??

I’m confused. When I search go*gle for my site with “WWW” site:www.mydowmain.com I get Results 1 - 10 of about 3,700 and when I look at my site without “www” - site:mydomain.com I get Results 1 - 10 of about 8,910 links for both www and non on go*gle shows the same. Is this something I should be worried about or is there something that needs to be done? I like the bigger number 8,910 but do the search engines view them as the same domain or as 2 different domains? Or am I screwed and have to view them as 2 domains. Other search engines show different site and link numbers. My site is about 7 yrs old and the name of the site is the Photoshop site in my signature. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. As stated in my profile I’m just a Grunt.

 

So what happens to all my old links that link to my non-www site? also currently my non-www seems to be ranking higher in the search engines than my www site. The reason i just noticed this is because my site was ranked #9 on ya*h** until last week, now down to #23 for the non-www and my www is ranked #57 for my main keyword. - thanks for the info. I assume i need to use the same redirect that you gave in this post:http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=89531&highlight=weird

 

ya, how to redirect www.mysite.com links to mysite.com ?

 

only use .htaccess , never Use any other method of REdirection, such as JS code, meta referesh othe other script code

 

by using the re-direct will the search engines include links and sites together for non-www and www domains?

 

Use .htaccess to do a 301 redirect to the www. version. Any links and PR on the domain.com version will then be credited to the www.domain.com version.

 

to redirect non www version to www version use this :

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

 

Don't you think Google is smart enough to realize that it is the same site if they have the same domain and the same content and therefor see all the links as votes weather they are pointing at www domain com or domain com?

 

No, it can result in a duplicate content penalty

 

Mattuk, I believe you are correct, my site was a pr5 and in the last update i was dropped to a pr4 and that's after updating my site and getting links. I think Go*gle saw my site as 2 different sites.

I have added the .htaccess file to my root directory with the code provided and at this point it's not working. I'm not sure if it's a cache problem or something with the hosting or just ME!

How will I know that it's working, Will I see the non change to WWW in the address bar?

 

If you've solved the URL problem through a 301 redirect either using .htaccess or in the control panel and think you're still suffering from a penalty try contacing Goolge explaining what you believe you've done to get a penalty and how you've fixed it.

Be patient, it can sometimes take a couple of months for any changes you make to show up.

In your case though a drop in PR is unlikely to be a symptom of a duplicate content penalty, at least on it's own. If you noticed this with a reduction in the number of your pages indexed then this may well be the cause.

 

Thanks for the advice and to all thanks for the help. I'm not that worried about my PR I can wait until the next update. I just want to get everything corrected and optimized. Because I am gulity of not touching my site for a few years. Also I just got off the phone with my hosting company and they have to activate/enable my .htaccess file. It's a new server. Oh and by the way up until Jan I had about 4900 pages index then it went down hill to about 10. Now it's looking good and I'm at 3700 for my www and 8900 for my non-www domain. So hopefully the 301 redirect will help.

 

So what's next. My Hosting company says that they do not support .htaccess? Is there another way to re-direct non www to www?

 

A search for "site:www.mydomain.com" gives all indexed pages of that domain.

A search for "site"mydomain.com" gives all indexed pages of that domain and all of the sub-domains as well.

That is why you get 2 different results. It doesnt have to do with .htaccess and all that other stuff - that stuff is a seperate issue.

 

Please, care to explain more??

 

guys I want to redirect my www pages to non www pages as most of the times I used http://mydomain.com for directory submission and very few times I have used www.mydomain.com. Code in .httacess will will be really helpful

Thanks

 

The code you are looking for is in this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=88514&highlight=redirect

 

I think a php redirect like:

<?php
header("Location: http://www.example.com/");
exit;
?>
would work.
You could read more at http://php.net/header

 

I think a php redirect like:

<?php
header("Location: http://www.example.com/");
exit;
?>
would work.
You could read more at http://php.net/header