How do i fix the problem of having 2 url's splitting my rankings?

[soundsenglish]

please excuse my noobness.

i have a nice  site, www.soundsenglish.com which I built from scratch and learned by doing. It has lots of nice content and it does ok, my rankings are woeful mostly cos of all the mistakes i made building it...i'll fix that stuff. This stuff i don't know about.

from my adsense i get 2 listings www.soundsenglish.com and soundsenglish.com

wierdly the second one gets consistently higher paying ads although most of the visitors come through the first but they are both the same landing page same content -as far as i can tell.

when i try to find rankings, use the seo tools etc i get diferent scores, so whatever it is, it is splitting the sites -  can't be a good thing.

i have no idea why this happens and i have some inkling that maybe i need something to do with cannonical  redirects or maybe a 301 redirect. both of which i have little idea how to do.

If that isn't enough naive blundering about for you, i have a little more...

it occurs to me that this prpoblem is probably happening with every page on my site,

i.e. the 'juice ' is not getting credited onto that one page.

this surely means cannonical redirects but even afterreading up on them

idon't quite get it. or rather ido but idon;t get  how to apply it to my context.

[FedeEinhorn]

Which server type are you using? Apache?

If you are:

1. Choose the one you prefer, www. or without www.
2. Redirect all your pages to the one you choose, let's say you go with the one without www.

In your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^soundsenglish.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://soundsenglish.com/$1 [R=301,L]

3. Go to Google Webmaster Tools > Configuration > Settings > Preferred Domain (choose the one you chose)

4. Check that all your links in your page point to the correct one. If you link to your internal pages like this you can skip this step.

[5. Wait for the results.

Hope that helps!](page.html)

[Thos003]

You need a 301 redirect from a www to a non www. Or vice-versa.

You need to read this article: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Here is some help if you have a windows server:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-on-windows-iis-help-part-2

A Canonical tag can be used when the split pages are the same pages but with two different URLs. So site.com/sneakers.php and site.com/sneakers, here you could create a canonical tag to let the bots know which page you'd prefer them to index.

Read more here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

[soundsenglish]

thanks for answering! yes it on Apache. i'll give that a go.

[soundsenglish]

great articles thanks!