When I signed up for directories I put my website link as "http://URL-HERE.com". In my site my links are "http://www.URL-HERE.com" (they used to not have the www). Would spiders think that "http://www.URL-HERE.com" and "http://URL-HERE.com" are 2 different websites? Should I resubmit my website to the directories with the different URL? (different as in with a "www" and without a "www")
I think it depends on the search engine. In the past, when I have searched for my site on Google, altering the URL has brought up different results.
Those will be seen as two different web sites. However, you can make Google see them as the same website by 301 redirecting one of the URLs to the other.
I think Google relatively recently made it so they both count as the canonical name for your domain. Don't quote me, think it was a post by Googleguy somewhere... 301 is still a good option though, for the sake of search engines who will count them separately. You can do it easily in .htaccess: rewriteEngine on rewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourdomain\.com RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] That's quite specific, you can generalise it for multiple subdomains with wildcards too of course...
Thanks for all the help. The code above was to change a www-url to a non-www-url. I used this code, which changes a non-www to a www: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
I don't know, I find that I have to search with and without the www. still to see my links. They maybe changing it tho, I do find some people automatically put a www. in front of your URL even when your URL doesn't have it in front of it. It would be nice if they did merge them.
a 2nd problem occured since I used the code above to redirect all my URLS to start with "http://www." now all my SSL urls (http://) gets redirected to "http://www.". This causes a problem because pages are no longer secure. currently this is how my redirect works: http://yourdomain.com -> http://www.yourdomain.com http://www.yourdomain.com -> http://www.youdomain.com https://yourdomain.com -> http://www.youdomain.com https://www.yourdomain.com -> http://www.youdomain.com Is there a way to reserve the SSL urls to not change? Ultimately I would want this to happen: http://yourdomain.com -> http://www.yourdomain.com http://www.yourdomain.com -> http://www.youdomain.com https://yourdomain.com -> https://youdomain.com https://www.yourdomain.com -> https://youdomain.com I would like to know if this is possible with the .htaccess file. p.s. (i need to keep the SSL urls like "https://yourdomain.com" because when I bought the SSL certificate I didn't include the www)