Www.xyz.com v/s xyz.com creating duplicate pages

[Britewave]

I just put my site in moz analytics. The crawl results says I have duplicate content. When I look at the pages it is because one page is www.xyz.com and the duplicate is xyz.com.   What causes this and how can it be fixed. I'm not a developer, so be kind and speak a language I can understand.

Thanks for your help

[SamuelScott]

I hope this isn't too technical, but just do a 301 redirect from either www.xyz.com to xyz.com or vice versa (your choice) for all pages on your website. That should solve the issue! (You can and should also set one of those as the canonical domain in Google Webmaster Tools.)

If that doesn't make sense, just reply!

[Philip-DiPatrizio]

In your scenario, you will want to choose one or the other, and setup a force WWW (or non-WWW) 301 redirect.  If your site is on a linux-based platform, that is accomplished with an htaccess file.  If you are on a Windows-based server, you will need to use IIS (I think).  A simple Google search for "force www redirect windows server" will likely return tons of solutions.

If you're on Wordpress or a similar CMS, it is usually very easy to do from within the backend.  If you have no idea what server you're on, or what platform your site is built on, use builtwith.com to find out

How do you choose between www.example.com or just example.com?  You'll want to go with the one that's linked to more often, and then work on sticking with that as often as possible in the future.  The majority of the link juice that's pointing towards example.com will be transfered to www.example.com with the 301 redirect, so it's not like those links without WWW will be worthless.  They only lose a very tiny amount of their value through the redirect.  The good news is, you're fixing a big issue so it isn't going to get worse for you.

Let me know if you have more questions.

[Britewave]

I get that!!  Does this happen when a site is built?  Does it just happen by default, or was something not done correctly when the site was built?

Thanks for your quick response

[Britewave]

I don't currently know which one is linked to more often. I will look into that. Thanks for that little tip and your fast response.

[Philip-DiPatrizio]

The 'default' setup will be for no redirects to be in place.  It's not that something was done incorrectly, but rather, a best practice for SEO was overlooked.  It's not something your average Joe or webmaster with no SEO experience is likely going to.

[SamuelScott]

Yes, when you setup a website normally, this will usually be a default issue that needs to be addressed. It's an overall problem (though easy to fix) that has yet to be addressed. So, no, it's not your fault -- but it's on you and every other site owner to fix it.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Viresh,

The 301 redirect option is perfect, and so is using the canonical tag to point one "version" of the site to the other if you would rather do that - instructions for doing that are here. Just make sure, as you would with the redirect, the the canonical tag points on a page-by-page basis. That is, xyz.com/page31.html has a canonical tag on it pointing to www.xyz.com/page31.html, not to www.xyz.com/.

Cheers,

Jane