Hi all, I was looking at a domain in yahoo search that was ranked number 1 in the serps but although all the other sites listed on the first page started www.etc.com this domain was just starting whatever.com and no www. Why does this happen???? Am very curious cheers all mrix
Because your not using apache to redirect quires to domain.com -> www.domain.com. Search DP or Google for "htaccess redirect domain.com to www.domain.com" or "htaccess" or "mod rewrite." Hope that points yah in the right direction. And only build links to www.domain.com.
You can see this if you have not implemented Canonical URLs on your site. In otherwords, if you can access pages as http://example.com and the browser stays http://example.com AND you can also access your site as http://www.example.com and your browser stays http://www.example.com, then Google and the other search engines see http://www.example.com and http://example.com as different URLs. You need to fix your site so that you do not have canonical issues. You now have split page rank and duplicate content issues. Let me explain... Google and the other engines rank URLs. They don't rank sites... they don't even rank web pages. Every unique URL is considered by the search engines to be a different 'page' in their index. Most sites out there not professionally SEO'd have canonical issues because they are not aware of this fact. And half of the so called SEOs out there don't even understand it. Every 'page' on your site should have one and ONLY one URL. This is called the canonical URL or preferred URL. For example, http://example.com/ http://example.com/index.html http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.html might all be URLs for your home page. The search engines see these as 4 different 'pages' because each has a different URL. This leads to a couple of problems that affect your rankings for particular keyword phrases - 1) duplicate content and 2) split page rank/link juice. It leads to duplicate content because your site serves up the exact same content (your home page) under all 4 URLs. So one of the 4 URLs (you have no way of knowing which) gets flagged as the original version of the content and the other 3 get flagged as duplicate. For the 3 duplicate versions of the home page, all ranking factors that are based on the content of the page are devalued in the ranking algorithm. Since the search engines see them as 4 different pages, if they each have 10 inbound links from 10 different sites then what you have is 4 URLs with 10 inbound links each. The way to fix this is to decide on some rules of how to determine which URL is the canonical or preferred URL. This usually means making decisions like: - www vs non-www - show trailing '/' when referencing folders w/ default documents or hide the trailing '/' - show default document filename when referencing folders w/ default documents or hide the default document name - if you support https as well then which pages should be https and which should be http (don't allow a single page to get indexed as both) It doesn't matter which rules you decide on for constructing canonical URLs as long as you decide on the rules and enforce them across your site w/ 301 redirects. I always choose www, show trailing '/', and hide default document name. So my preferred canonical URL in the above example would be http://www.example.com/ but that is just my preference. To fix the canonical issues you simply redirect all other non-canonical URLs to the canonical URL similar to the following: http://example.com/ --> 301 redirect --> http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/index.html --> 301 redirect --> http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/ Canonical URL No Redirect Required http://www.example.com/index.html --> 301 redirect --> http://www.example.com/ Now the search engines will give your canonical URL credit for all inbound links to the other 3 URLs as well as giving it credit for the link text used to link to the other 3 non-canonical URLs. This means the PR will be passed from the other 3 non-canonical URLs to the canonical. The redirects also cause the other 3 non-canonical URLs to drop out of the index. So now the search engines see your home page http://www.example.com/ as a single URL with 40 inbound links instead of 4 different URLs with 10 links each. This eliminates duplicate content issues on your site and split page rank. Your home page will gain some PR because it's getting credit for 4 times as many inbound links and hopefully because of the additional links w/ relevant link text it will rank better for the terms other sites are using in the links. It now has 4 times as many link texts to be considered for keyword rankings in the SERPs and 4 times as many potentially relevant refering pages to be considered. If you're hosted on Apache, you can correct these issues w/ Mod Rewrite.