I suppose sooner or later I'll get tired of posting about this. But it's not sooner nor later...yet. My religious jewelry site has been plagued by having both the www and non-www URL in the Yahoo index for around 8 months now. This despite the fact that there has been a 301 in place for over a year now. No issues on any other SE's. Which URL they decide to use is query specific. The most notable query is for 'religious jewelry' for which I have enjoyed a page one ranking for some time. As soon as they decided to start returning the non-www URL the homepage dropped from page 1 to page 5 and sometimes it completely disappears for periods of time. I've watched my traffic, and converting traffic, cut in half or more, all through the xmas season and now into the peak of the Spring religious season. Sucks to be me huh. I posted this on the Site Explorer Suggestion Board and the reply I got from a Yahoo employee is rather priceless... suggestions.yahoo.com/detail/?prop=SiteExplorer&fid=136141 What's kept a bur under my saddle about this is that given the economy any missed traffic is important to me and it certainly appears there's not a damn thing I can do about it. 2 things I'm considering... 1. Adding the canonical <link> tag to the page. (not that I expect it to do any good) 2. Since I have a 301 in place and it shouldn't affect the other SE's, start building links to the non-www URL. I'm seriously considering both. Any thoughts?
I would worry less about trying to get your www (or non-www) pages de-indexed from Yahoo, (since it's not likely that this caused your Yahoo rankings to drop), and work on other things that will improve your rankings. I think it would be really silly to try and build links to a page that is redirected. If you just build links to the correct page it should eventually start to outrank the one that you have redirected. If not in Yahoo, then in Google, which will give you WAY more traffic then Yahoo.