Should I have a redirect - and what kind of redirect - from mysite.com to www.mysite.com I have been on website rater which says I have 1000 links to mysite.com that I am not getting the link juice for. Thanks FH
I think this issue is known as canonical issue and you can use .htaccess file to resolve this problem. 301 redirect is used for redirecting users from url : abcd -> url : 1234 The issue which you have mentioned is known as canonical issue of website urls.
hi, generally it is called canonical issue. I suggest 301 redirect is better for your website. Also please checked below mentioned tips for how to redirect from non www to www : > http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&star...2MzmBA&usg=AFQjCNFPjS9x8vKRJCfoW1eLi43kXoZSKw > http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
There is also another way to solve this. Google Webmaster Tools And the links you have are PR0 or Graybars that don't pass PR
You can't solve canonicalization issues w/ Google Webmaster Tools. You CAN tell Google you prefer either the www or non-www to be used in the SERPs but it does NOT solve canonicalization issues. It does not fix the problem of www.example.com vs www.example.com/ vs www.example.com/index.html. Otherwise Google, Yahoo, & MSN wouldn't have bothered to come up with the new <link rel=canonical> method of fixing canonicalization issues. The approach suggested by Google and the other search engines for fixing canonical issues has always been to use 301 redirects. They came up w/ <link rel="canonical"> because some HTML sites without access to Mod_Rewrite on Apache or the equivalent (like ISAPI Rewrite for IIS) don't have the luxury of doing 301 redirects. Pages with a toolbar PR=0 DO pass PR. Toolbar PR0 does not mean NO PR... It means the page has more 'real' PR than 0 but less 'real' PR than is needed to show a Toolbar PR1... just like a Toolbar PR=3 means your (PR >=3 and PR < 4). If a page is graybarred it typically means 1) the page is not in the Google index so they haven't calculated a 'real' and Toolbar PR for it, 2) they page is in the index but Google hasn't issued a Toolbar PR update since it was indexed (they typically update Toolbar PR every 3-4 months and by the time it's updated it is already out of date), or 3) the page is being penalized for some violation of Webmaster Guidelines. And as others have said you should choose 1 URL to refer to each page on your site. This is the canonical URL. You should 301 redirect all other URLs for that same page to the canonical. For example, you might have an index.html for your home page. I can reference your home page several ways: http://example.com http://example.com/ http://example.com/index.html http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.html If each of the above URL had 10 inbound links, Google sees these as 6 different pages each with 10 inbound links. It doesn't matter which you pick for your canonical. Typically you need to decide: 1) use www or non-www 2) show trailing '/' for folders containing default documents or hide trailing '/' 3) show default document filename for folders containing default documents or hide default document filename I always use www, show trailing '/', and hide default document name... So I would pick http://www.example.com/ as my canonical URL. Again, it's personal preference. But I would come up with a set of rules as described above and enforce it site-wide. So... I would implement the following: http://example.com ---> 301 redirect ---> http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/ ---> 301 redirect ---> http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/index.html ---> 301 redirect ---> http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com ---> 301 redirect ---> http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/ CANONICAL NO REDIRECT REQUIRED http://www.example.com/index.html ---> 301 redirect ---> http://www.example.com/ This eliminates issues with duplicate content and split page rank / link equity. The canonical URL will get credit for all inbound links to the other 5 redirected URLs (and therefore the page rank). Google will now see this as a single URL with 60 inbound links.