Hey guys, the whole “www and non www†issue is somewhat confusing to me… Actually, I don’t get it at all. It seems all websites are accessible by typing in www or non www so how do I know if I’m having canonicalization issues with my site? Also, I just noticed today that when I login to Google webmaster tools it now has TWO sites listed for my site (a www and a non www version) I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but I feel like its bad. Here is our site sheffieldfurniture.com Thanks to anyone that can help shed some light on this subject!
Let me use your site as an example: If you type in www.sheffieldfurniture.com or sheffieldfurniture.com they both go to the homepage, but they do not redirect. In other words if you enter sheffieldfurniture.com without the www, it does not redirect to www.sheffieldfurniture.com it stays at sheffieldfurniture.com and vice versa. So since both URLs end up on the same page without redirecting you run the risk of the search engines seeing it as duplicate content. For your site you want to redirect one of your versions to the other, so for example if you decide you want to redirect the non www version to the www version, then if someone entered in sheffieldfurniture.com it would 301 redirect to www.sheffieldfurniture.com. This would solve any canonical issues. Hopefully that answers your questions.
Well both your URLs (www and non www) are opening the same page and you might get penalized for duplicate content. Yes, it is a bad practice to keep two versions of the same thing. Choose the URL you prefer to keep and use a 301 redirect to the preferred page which makes it easier for Google to know which URL is canonical. Refer to this link for canonicalization queries http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
Yes, it is very important to eliminate anything what looks to Google like duplicate content. For example http://example.com/, http://example.com/index.php, http://www.example.com/, and http://www.example.com/index.php are likely to hit your index.php and display the same content. You may think everything is OK. No, it is not. Google will think you have 4 different pages showing the same content - you get duplicate content penalty. Here is what you can do. Your first option is to use .htaccess and 301 redirect http://example.com/index.php, http://www.example.com/, and http://www.example.com/index.php to http://example.com/. Your second option is to edit your index.php and put the link rel="canonical" (with proper href) in your head section. I hope this gives you an idea. Of course the same applies to all other pages on your website.
There is one more issue which I missed in my reply - sites linking to you using url arguments. For example, someone could link to you like this: http://www.example.com/index.php?name=suzan. Again this will hit your index.php and you will display the same content as always. But ... to Google this looks like duplicate content. Again, the head secion line with 'link rel="canonical" ....' will address the problem because it tells Google that this page is the same as http://example.com/.
It is very important to resolve this canonical issue Google consider it as two different sites and it can be resolve through 301 Redirect