Hi, I am writing here because I was unable to find anything on google (don't know how to phrase it in search terms). Anyway, at work, one of our clients who gets A LOT of traffic was notified by someone that they will lose their search engine rankings and be penalized because we have two aliases set up for their domain like so: http://www.domain.com and http://domain.com They claim that you can't do that and have to pick one or the other. My boss told me to research this problem...and like I said, I couldn't find anything. My boss wants to set up a 301 Redirect if this is the case to preserve their search engine rankings... Anyone know what this person might be talking about? Thanks.
You won't get penalized for this, or they would have to penalize basically every old website that hasn't been updated in several years (before this became a known issue). It is still a good idea to make each page on your website only accessible from one specific url. This is more to ensure that you get all of the link juice being sent to those pages. When you have two different urls for one page, some link juice goes to each version depending on where your links are pointing. So fixing this problem is more about ensuring that you take full advantage of your backlinks and internal links.
Ideally you should set up a 301 redirect to either your www, or non-www version. While you will not receive a direct Google penalty, you will be diluting your link portfolio with having to versions of the website being indexed. You might also consider setting up a (free) Google Webmasters account. Google will allow you to specify which version of your website that you prefer to be displayed within Google's search results.
Thanks for the replies. That makes sense...I have to ask my boss where the threat came from... By any chance does anyone have a link to an article explaining this specific issue? From what I got from vansterdam's post, it is a known issue...but not one that will penalize you in search rankings excessively. I'd just like to read up more on it. Thanks again.
It's not an "issue" as much as it is a bad coding practice on the part of most webmasters. Anyone who knows SEO makes this their 1st priority to fix because it fixes a LOT of issues with their site and can bring with it BIG rewards. As vansterdam said, there is NO penalty for this... Although your friend is right to a certain degree... It DOES prevent you from ranking as well as you could. If you want to research it, look up canonical URLs. Hopefully this will help... Google and the other engines rank URLs. 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. 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 URLs to the canonical. The redirects also cause the other 3 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. Hope that helps.
to keep it short, sweet, and simple, there will be no penaly but your SERP ranking may suffer if you use both. just use 301 redirect which will take are of the issue
Maybe this will help explain how Google handles this and what they recommend. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=44231&hl=en