Duplicate Page Content and Title

[David-Sulak]

Hi. New to Moz here. I really like all of the tools.

Moz recently sent me a Crawl Report and flagged every page as a duplicate content and duplicate title. The only reason/difference between the pages it flagged is the beginning of the URL. The crawl report shows the http://websitename.com and then http://www.websitename.com/

Is there something I'm missing about setting up my website? You can use either form to browse to my website, with the www and without. Why would Moz flag that as a duplicate?

Scott

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Scott. I'm glad to hear you're finding the tools and community useful here.   Here's the Google Support document regarding your site's current setup: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en.  On it you'll find that Google states, "If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages." This means that you could be diluting the value of links from one version or the other and not seeing gains as quickly if people are splitting your links between the two.

You have a couple options. In Google Webmaster Tools you can set one version or the other as the preferred domain, but this isn't a universal feature across the net.  It's better to use redirection to make one the default.  Here's an older question along the same lines answered by the community to give you even more opinions: http://moz.com/community/q/benefit-to-301-redirect-domain-com-to-www-domain-com-or-vice-versa. And the Moz guide on using canonicalization: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization.  These should point you in the right direction.

[RyanPurkey]

P.S. The Moz.com developers recently wrote a blog post on duplication that really gets into the nitty gritty of why it's important to have pages that are canonical: https://moz.com/devblog/near-duplicate-detection/.  A bit technical, but excellent stuff if you have that bent.

[Anti-Alex]

It's best to choose either www or non-www and stick with that single URL. When people link to you, you don't want some links going to www and others to non-www. Just use one and 301 redirect the other URL into the one you're going to use.

Also make the use of canonical tags. Ryan there sent over some links for that. It's best to set that up on all your pages as well.

[David-Sulak]

Thanks so much, Ryan and Alex for the information. I can see I need to do some more research, so I appreciate the links and advice. We're using Yahoo Web Hosting and the Small Business Plan so, unfortunately as best I can tell, there's no support for 301 redirects. I didn't realize this was not a feature as our site is fairly small and I've never needed to redirect anything before. I've been thinking about moving the site for a long time and now I'm thinking I should step that up.  I've had the preferred Domain name set up in Web Master Tools for years. I don't see anything else there that seems to help.  Thanks again!