I've got a question. I noticed when I type in my URL in with the www and without the www they both go to my page. For example: www.wowguideonline.com and wowguideonline.com Will this cause Google to penalize me for duplicate content? Also I noticed another small fact. All my sites are hosted on the same server. Lets say Site1.com (it is not) is my main site, and my wowguideonline.com site is hosted there as well. If I type in www.site1.com/wowguideonline it also brings up my www.wowguideonline.com site. Is there a way to stop this? Can it cause the duplicate content penalty?
Ofcourse not! All sites can be accessed by typing www or without www, so there is no chance for Google to penalize you. if this is the case then almost all sites are banned
However It is recommended to redirect form http://mysite to http://www.mysite This can be done in .htaccess
I never heard of duplicate content penalties being associated with or without www - AFAIK you can have both �
Both www.yourwebsite.com and yourwebsite.com are refernces of similar content. There exists only one copy of content hence there's no content duplication, its rather URL duplication as search engine indexes both references(with and without www) differently.
Not for SEO purposes, but just for the visitors. Have you seen any popular website can be viewed with both http:// and http://www ? I haven't but perhaps in all those years I haven't noticed any... In most cases they redirect to one or the other...
If you have an account at google webmaster tools, google gives you the option of setting a preferred domain. You will be able to redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com.
The guys at SEMOZ talk about this all the time. Yes it is a problem. You can pick one, and redirect the other.
As the previous poster viitol said, use .htaccess - it gets rid of the doubt. You can then ensure that http://domain.com goes to www.domain.com and prevent any chance of duplication.