Hi all... Recently, I did some link building for SEO purposes and some of the major sites I exchanged links with put up the link to my website url WITHOUT the "WWW" in front of the domain name. After a week I checked for links from any external pages in Google's Webmaster Central and found out that all external links linking to my site WITHOUT the "WWW" was not indexed, where as, the ones with the WWW shows. I hope some SEO experts here can clarify that this is true and hope that others do not repeat my mistake. Anybody had the same experience?
Links can take anywhere from 2 - 6 weeks to show up in google webmaster tools. And I have even seen some links take 8 weeks or more to show up. If that is not bad enough, I have a few dozen links that are 3+ months old and are STILL not showing up in my google webmaster central / webmaster tools. In other words, its usually going to take longer then 1 week for your backlinks to start showing up. Give it another month or two and go from there.
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. If you have the above situation and verified your site as www.example.com in Google Webmaster Tools then you will only be able to see sites linking to you with http://www.example.com. You will not see the links for http://example.com URLs. Simply goto the dashboard in Google's WMT, Add Site the non-www version of your site (like example.com), and verify it. It should verify instantly as long as the DNS for www.example.com and example.com both point to the same root folder on your web. Now you should be able to see the links to the http://example.com under the example.com site in WMT. But you REALLY 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. Google and the other 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 Google sees 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 Google 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 Google sees 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.
Wow Canonical! Thanks for the very detailed information. It goes to show your sincerity in helping other people. Kudos to you, I have learned a lot from your posting. I will take a look into correcting my mistakes now.....CHEERS!
Here's the code and vid tutorial you'll need (can't post links yet, so paste this into your brower) getmoresales.info/blog/prevent-a-different-type-of-duplicate-content.html Good luck
google htaccess and modrewrite, lots of these questions here on DP lately. WWW is just the subdomain.