Excuse me if this is a bit noobish, but I'm a bit unclear in this area. I always wondered this, and am just now deciding to finally get an answer once and for all. I just checked my site with Yahoo! Site Explorer to see my backlinks. http://example.com has 11,000ish backlinks http://www.example.com has 2,000ish backlinks Is this hurting me in Google's eyes? In reality, I really have 13,000 backlinks. But since some link to my site with "www" and others don't, am I losing out? If I am, is there a way to fix this? Thanks.
This is actually two pages for search engines. You can add an htaccess file to redirect all traffic to desired version of your url. You can also specify in Google webmaster , which version you want google to respect.
Exactly, you want to do this on every site you own, either redirect to the www version or non www version, whichever one you think looks better. I honestly think google is able to for the most part, filter it themselves these days, but its worth making the htaccess file just to be on the safe point. But yes this has caused other peoples sites to plummet down in rank in the past.
Ah, thanks guys. I just noticed something though. When I go to my site, if I put in: www.example.com Firefox fixes it and changes it to http://example.com If I try this on another random site, the www stays. I have had my preferred domain set in Google for a few months now, can that be the reason?
Bump. Basically, in my last post, I was asking if it is now necessary for my to do the htaccess redirect?
Don't worry about it. Millions of webmasters don't do anything to their http and www version. If this was the case Google would have deindexed half the websites by now. Why would they want to penalize you for this anyway?
Listen Carefully! In terms of Google, this is a clear case of "URL canonicalization". This means, Google is treating your "www" version and "non www" version as TWO SEPARATE urls. Did I say 2 separate urls? with exactly the SAME CONTENT? ALARM ALARM!!! "Content Duplication" noticed! --- Also, this issue leads to different URLs being indexed and linked by different websites. So according to your example, "non www" and "www" has different counts of in bound links. Very bad isn't it? you would definitely want all the links to point to a single target (more inbound links, higher and tougher your SERP position) So my friend, Get a "301 Redirect" asap to the domain you PREFER. AND Modify all the INTERNAL links to point to THAT domain! You got your answer Cheers and regards