www And Non-www Version Of Your Webpages Is both the www and non-www version of your webpage is indexed in Goog

[iGuest 3]

The Search Engine Crawlers interprete URLs like

 

https://www.eurodns.com/ ( Non-www version)

https://www.eurodns.com/ ( www version)

 

as different urls containing the same content. With recent Google drive to track pages containing duplicate content, there is always a possibility that your website may be penalised. So if you have the same problem ( just make a site: query in Google to see whether both www version as well as non-www version of your webpage is indexed therein), you need to resolve it at once.

If you have access to your .htaccess file, you can simply do so by adding the following lines of codes in your .htaccess file.

 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainname\.comRewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ [R=permanent,L]

The above two lines redirect a request for http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ to https://www.eurodns.com/

 

Thus the urls

https://www.eurodns.com/

and

https://www.eurodns.com/

 

will be treated as two urls pointing to the same locations .

 

If Google has already indexed both of the www as well as non-www version , making a http :301 PERMANENT REDIRECT ( as cited above) will help the crawler to correct the indexing. It usually takes two to four weeks to see the changes in Google Index.

 

Tips:

Always create a backup copy of your existing .htaccess file.

Never use Google's URL removal tool to remove the non-www ( or www) version of the url.

 

Regards,

Sid

[abhiram 0]

Wow, that's weird. I didn't know that search engines considered them separately. Doesn't seem to make sense since I don't see how the www and non-www addresses could point to two different locations.Looks like Google is only considering the non-www version of my site.

[miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0]

This is also very new to me.. as far as I knew, all domains are made to point to the www server by default, as I'd explained long back in the post, What is www1?

[iGuest 3]

Thanks for your response and special thanks to m^e for the link to your previous post in this regard. It is very informative. Now let us come back to the topic. So far as I have understood from different forums and blogs for the W/Ms that this issue need be addressed with much care now-a-days.

 

I think a post by Google Engineer Matt Cutts in his blog deserves a reading. Here is the link:

 

MattCutts.com-SEO-Advice-url-Canonicalization/

 

Also one more point to note: Using both the www and non-www version will affect the Page Rank of both the versions. Your www version may have a PR5 while non-www version may have a PR3.

 

Infact the crawlers consider https://www.eurodns.com/ as different from https://www.eurodns.com/login/.

 

So as a rule of thumb, always use the same form of your url everywhere.

 

Regards,

Sid

Edited June 1, 2006 by sid.calcutta (see edit history)

[TavoxPeru 0]

The Search Engine Crawlers interprete URLs like

 

https://www.eurodns.com/ ( Non-www version)

https://www.eurodns.com/ ( www version)

 

as different urls containing the same content. With recent Google drive to track pages containing duplicate content, there is always a possibility that your website may be penalised. So if you have the same problem ( just make a site: query in Google to see whether both www version as well as non-www version of your webpage is indexed therein), you need to resolve it at once.

If you have access to your .htaccess file, you can simply do so by adding the following lines of codes in your .htaccess file.

 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainname\.comRewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ [R=permanent,L]

The above two lines redirect a request for http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ to https://www.eurodns.com/

 

Thus the urls

https://www.eurodns.com/

and

https://www.eurodns.com/

 

will be treated as two urls pointing to the same locations .

 

If Google has already indexed both of the www as well as non-www version , making a http :301 PERMANENT REDIRECT ( as cited above) will help the crawler to correct the indexing. It usually takes two to four weeks to see the changes in Google Index.

 

Tips:

Always create a backup copy of your existing .htaccess file.

Never use Google's URL removal tool to remove the non-www ( or www) version of the url.

 

Regards,

Sid

 

Thanks for the tips, i have this problem a time ago and never realize that the solution is too simple.

 

best regards,

[ginginca 0]

There was once a time when having both addresses in the SE (google for example) was a good thing. It simply gave you two shots for the price of one. But now it's a bad thing. Google will penalize you for sure. One of my sites has experienced this in a big way, but I had a lot of other fixes to do prior to the redirect ... including removing dozens of flash files (SWF) from the index.I was pretty sure I had my robots.txt file correct .. but somehow it's getting past that particular line. (But my other disallows are functioning correctly).Google's an interesting animal *grin*

[vhortex 1]

Wow, that's weird. I didn't know that search engines considered them separately. Doesn't seem to make sense since I don't see how the www and non-www addresses could point to two different locations.
Looks like Google is only considering the non-www version of my site.

actually not all servers are configured like that..

i use to exploit that stuff by having different pages appear if they visit the www. version of my site and the non www. version..

[Arbitrary 0]

actually not all servers are configured like that..
i use to exploit that stuff by having different pages appear if they visit the www. version of my site and the non www. version..

Yeah, at one point I had a webhost that only offered the non www version for my domain name, and if I wanted a www version, I had to register a second domain name. But before discovering that, I also always thought they pointed to the same location and thus were interchangeable.

@ginginca, I think Google had a policy of only listing a certain number of pages per site (so that each of their search pages is not overflowing with repeated info from one site). Thus they probably consider the www and the non www version of your site to both be from the same site and believe that having both versions displayed in their search results is a violation of their policy.

[niran 0]

The problem can be solved by using the new sitemaps feature from Google Sitemaps Itself!

 

Now, we can see one extra option, if we click the dmain name inside the sitemaps!

Select any domain name and go to >> prefered Domain from options!

 

 

So that, we can give the default domain name to be displayed in the search results

and also we can show the bot that its the same stuff we are using!

 

Edited August 31, 2006 by Niran (see edit history)

[Mafamba Team 0]

I hadn't a clue that they were different?Google have domains, could someone message me a link for that please!Thanks if someone does it.

[borlafu 0]

Thanks for the tips sid.calcutta, .htaccess is really important for webmasters.

 

Niru, i'll check out that google app, it looks nice

[CaptainRon 0]

Although I knew that domain.com and
http://www.domain.com/
are different, since anyone who has done DNS configurations would know that. But Google crawls them differently is strange...I don't think it should be doing that way....

[ginginca 0]

Although I knew that domain.com and http://www.domain.com/ are different, since anyone who has done DNS configurations would know that. But Google crawls them differently is strange...

 

I don't think it should be doing that way....

 

Many of google's efforts to eliminate spam are effective. Although many of us regular non-spammy webmasters might see these as a pain, but they actually work. We just have to "abide by the rules and recommendations" to win at their game of inclusion.

 

If you look for example at the "aging factor". Google once did an analysis on the age of spammy domains vs the age of domain names of quality sites. They discovered that there were more spammy new domains than old domains. For this reason it is difficult to rank well for competitive keywords in the first nine months in google. (I didn't say impossible though.)

 

No one knows google's algorythm. But I know from personal experience that this www vs non-www is part of it. Likely for the same reason stated above for the "aging" factor. It seems likely that spammy sites submitted many duplicate pages with the same content in hopes that "something would stick".

 

BTW, duplicate content applies also to titles and descriptions. Make sure those are unique too.

 

GIN

[richierich1m 0]

yes that the exact problem i faced i was penalised and my indexed oages went away from google search my domain shaadiya.com and http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ were both indexed but thankfully the problem was later solved and my 12o pages got indexed again in 2 weeks but i think the problem arised because i set an association in google webmasters account and then i removed the association you can set this association in google webmasters account and you don't need to do that nescessarily its optional

[Chesso 0]

Haven't read all the replies, but has anyone noticed (including my web site), that some web sites, that only the www or non www version will load, how stange.They should both point to the exact same place, regardless.I wonder if this little trick would clear that problem up too?