What is the difference in searching for site:www.yoursite.com, and site:yoursite.com? When I do this for my site, I get varied results - by about 3 to 10 pages, depending on when I do the searches. Somehow, taking out the "www" yields fewer results. Anyone else experience this before, and know why there is a difference?
You should get the same result for both site:www.site.com and site:site.com if you are getting different results this means, SE is taking site.com and www.site.com as two different sites, your host probably doesnt have default settings to redirect requests from http://site.com to http://www.site.com you can do it by putting a 301 redirect in your .htacess file.
No matter, all sites should use the 301 redirect as some search engines are a little slow in figuring out the .site and www.site are one in the same (usually) It happens as the spiders follow links.. an inbound link to .site.htm would only follow the .site unless us have static links that redirect on the www side.. without the redirect, a .site.html link would create a "duplicate" spidering of a dynamic site
You're saying that based on how my inbound links read, (whether they have the "www" in them or not) this could possibly make a SE (sort of) see the site as two separate sites, and so the site crawled and indexed as such, right?
That is correct.. the link without the www may also come from inside the site itself.. It is a lot easier to see just one set of pages, than it is to track SE using both or splitting them up.. Either call your hosting company and ask them to make that change for you (so that any request without a "www" will re-direct to the "www" URL or vice versa). If you are hosting on a *NIX server that has MOD_REWRITE enabled, you can put the following rewrite rule in the .htaccess file in your website root folder and it will do the re-direct for you: RewriteEngine On # Force the www RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [QSA,L,R=301] Code (markup): The first line activates the rewrite engine, and is required before making any rewrite rules. The next line, which starts with the "#", is a comment line, and simply explains what our rule is doing. Without going into too much detail about MOD_REWRITE, the next two lines evaluate the URL request coming to the server, and re-direct if needed. The RewriteCond looks for URL requests that do not have "www" in them. If one is detected, the following rule will be applied, which redirects to the same URL with the "www" added to the beginning. Thanks to Brian Getting of practical eCommerce for first showing me this. (I quoted him here) This will also eliminate the duplicate content some SE may be penalizing you for if they in fact are spidering both sides of the site.. Jason