Crawler Stats

[EQ-Richie]

Hello,

On all of my crawler stats, it is showing both http://domainhere.com and http://www.domainhere.com

Is it bad to have both types of URLS (one with www and one without www) or should we be only using links with www?

This question may not make any sense, but pretty much should it matter that both versions are showing up in my crawler results or not?

Thanks for any help in advance.

[UnderRugSwept]

Yes, it matters. It could mean that Google is detecting it that way too, and may view them as two different sites with duplicate content. This could be hurting your rankings. Do you have access to your .htaccess file? You should add this code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domainhere.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domainhere.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will redirect the non-www version to the www version and tell the crawlers this is how you'd prefer your site to display.

[EQ-Richie]

RewriteEngine on rewritecond %{http_host} ^domainhere.com [nc] rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domainhere.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

This is what I currently have in my .htaccess file - is this wrong, and should I change it to the method that you posted?

Any information is appreciated. Thanks!

[UnderRugSwept]

I'm not sure by looking at it if it's wrong since I'm not really an Apache coder. But I'm just guessing it's probably wrong since the bots are still detecting both versions of your site. I have it the way I showed you in my .htaccess file and I don't have any problems with bots detecting multiple versions. Maybe try it this way. You can always make a backup of your current file and switch back if it doesn't make a difference.

[EQ-Richie]

Thanks for the reply. I am going to change it to your method now and see what happens.

Thanks!

[UnderRugSwept]

It make take a full crawl or two before it fixes itself. Keep me posted.

[Stevej24]

This article about canonicalization might help:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

[Stevej24]

This article about canonicalization might help:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization