Should I be running my crawl on our www address or our non-www address?

[THMCC]

I currently run our crawl on oursitename.com, but am wondering if it should be run on www.oursitename.com instead.

[SEO5Team]

Pick the one that has more inbound links associated with it and already has high pages in the index. Make sure you set the preferences in WMT to either the www. or the non www version.

[THMCC]

I thought they were the same...with a 301 redirect from oursitename to www.oursitename.com so I am confused as to why one would have more inbound links than the other.  Also, what is WMT?

Thanks!!!

[ThompsonPaul]

As far as the search engines are concerned, thmedicalcallcenter.com and www.thmedicalcallcenter.com are two separate sites that will compete against each other and dilute each others' authority and ranking unless one is 301-redirected to the other.

As SEO5 indicates, it's best to assess which version already has the most incoming links and use that version as the primary, redirecting the other one to it.

This is best done using a 301 redirect written into your site's .htaccess file. In addition, there is spot in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT or WMT) where you can also hint to Google which version of the site you want to be the primary.

It's not enough to only use the hint in GWT as that only applies to Google, it will do nothing to correct the problem in the other search engines.

Paul

[THMCC]

Thanks again!! One more question if you don't mind. If the 301 redirect is done correctly will this fix the competition issue in all the search engines? If not, should I get rid of oursitename.com?

[THMCC]

Thanks so much, Paul!!

The SEO Moz helpdesk is who told me that I needed to have oursitename.com in addition to www.oursitename.com. Is this true? Creating oursitename.com and the redirect seems to have caused a lot of errors, mostly duplicates from the redirect probably not being done correctly. But overall, was/is it in our best interest to have both www.oursitename.com and oursitename.com?

[ThompsonPaul]

There's really no way to avoid the existence of the two different addresses, THMCC - they're a byproduct of the way of the way web servers and domain names work. They both exists as soon as a website is created. And visitors tend to use them interchangeably.

They aren't "actually" two different sites, they are just two different addresses that refer to the same pages, causing the search engines to see them as duplicate content. Kind of like how your house's location can be described by the lot number on the city plan, or by the postal address. Same house - different ways of showing where it's located.

If the 301 redirect is done correctly, the search engines will understand that everything should be considered to be at the one primary address and they'll pass along the other version's authority to the primary version automatically. And therefore no second version to compete with.

You can easily tell if the redirect is working properly. Let's assume you decide for example that the www.thmedicalcallcenter.com version is the primary and redirect the non-www version to it. When you type in the non-www address into the browser's address bar and hit enter, you should actually see the URL in the address bar change to the www version of the address.

And yea, you absolutely must have both addresses taken care of. You have no way of controlling whether someone types in the address with or without the www. and you want either one to get forwarded on to the primary address.

Does that all makes sense?

Paul

[THMCC]

It does make sense. Based on what you wrote, ours is not set up correctly. But now I have the language to better work with our provider.

You are very helpful!! Thank you!