How can I tell which website pages are hosted on the root domain vs the www subdomain?

[webestate]

One of the SEOmoz help desk professionals told me this today regarding some of my website pages.

"it looks like you have pages hosted as separate pages on both the root domain and the www subdomain, which means that these pages are competing for rankings and authority. You may want to consider a 301 redirect or the use of rel=canonical tags.".

Can anyone help me understand this?   How can I tell which pages are which?

[NakulGoyal]

Do a site:yourdomain.com and then do a site:subdomain.yourdomain.com and you should be able to find the pages you are referring to. Doing a site:www.yourdomain.com will only show pages from www presuming non www is set to correctly redirect to www and the preferred display URL is set in Google as the one with www. I hope this helps.

[webestate]

Hi Nakul,

Thank you for that.  According to SEOmoz definition of a subdomain......the only subdomain I have would be WWW

She also told me this.

I can tell that you have two separate pages set up for the subdomain and the root domain because when I go to http://www.austintenantadvisors.com/ and http://austintenantadvisors.com/, both pages are live URLs that don't redirect from one to the either and neither page has a canonical tag in the source code. In fact, it looks like all of the pages on your site live on both the www subdomain and also the root domain separately. You should look into fixing this issue before you decide how to set up the campaign because the way you choose to correct the issue will decide where the pages are actually hosted, which is how you choose how to base your campaign. For example, if you decide to have the www pages redirect to the non-www pages, you will want to set the campaign up as a root domain campaign or we won't crawl past the redirect. One thing to take in to consideration when redirecting these pages is to see which version is ranking in the search engines. Here is a good resource about redirecting pages on your site from Google Webmaster Tools

Can you recommend the best course of action?

1.  Redirect www pages to the non-www pages  OR

2..  Redirect non-www pages to www pages

[mytouchoftech]

Chances are they aren't separate pages.  canonical tags are what you want to use.  They essentially combine different ways of getting to your pages into 1 indexable page.  So

www.example.com

example.com

example.com/index.html

all point to the same page, but if you put in the section, no matter how the crawler got there, it should consider the page www.example.com, which means you wont have the competing pages issue.

[webestate]

Thanks Andrew.  Would you recommend doing 301 redirects as well as canonical tags?

[mytouchoftech]

Yes I would do both.  If your goal is to standardize to either www or non-www, then redirect to one or the other.  This will assure new backlinks go to the desired version.  The canoicalization should standardize the link power on Google's end.

[Dr-Pete]

Did something change recently? I'm currently seeing your non-www pages 301-redirect to the "www." version, at least in a handful of cases. There are a couple of oddities where a page double-301s, but that looks isolated. I'm not seeing any clear signs of a problem.

You don't need both canonicals and 301s for this particular issue, although a canonical tag can still have value on other parts of the site (including the home-page).

[webestate]

Thanks Dr. Meyers.  I did a 301 redirect for everything to go to www.  Hopefully that fixes it.  Thank You!

[webestate]

Thanks Dr. Meyers.  I did a 301 redirect for everything to go to www.  Hopefully that fixes it.  Thank You!