Www vs. non-www differences in crawl errors in Webmaster tools...

[RossFruin]

Hey All,

I have been working on an eCommerce site for a while that to no avail, continues to make me want to hang myself. To make things worth the developers just do not understand SEO and it seems every change they make just messes up work we've already done. Job security I guess.

Anywho,most recently we realized they had some major sitemap issues as almost 3000 pages were submitted by only 20 or so were indexed. Well, they updated the sitemap and although all the pages are properly indexing, I now have 5000+ "not found" crawl errors in the non-www version of WMT and almost none in the www version of the WMT account.

Anyone have insight as to why this would be?

[TakeshiYoung]

Is the non-www version redirecting to www? If not, you should configure your htaccess file so that it redirects. Then you can see if the not found errors persist.

[RossFruin]

Not entirely sure if it is set up that way in HTaccess. I do have it set up that way in WMT though (preferred domain.)

Also isn't this what rel=canonical is for? If all my www pages redirected to my non www pages through HT access then what would I use that tag for?

[TakeshiYoung]

In my experience, 301 redirects work better than canonical tags for redirecting non-www to www. Even with the redirects in place, though, you should still use canonicals because it helps prevent duplicate content in cases of query parameters getting indexed.

Here is the htaccess code if you need it:

#Options +FollowSymlinks
Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

This will automatically redirect all non-www URLs to www.