Identifying a 301-redirect problem?

[williammarlow]

I was looking at the Search Engine Optimization reports for one of my clients in Google Analytics, and I saw that their two biggest landing pages are www.website.com and http://website.com.  Does this mean that Google is serving both the 'www' and 'non-www' versions of the website, and thus harming the website's overall ranking?

Thanks for any input!

[William.Lau]

Yes, this means either they have inbound links referring to the http://website.com and http://www.website.com.

This happens all the time especially if you don't have a redirect in place.

I suggest going into your WMT and choosing preferred http://www.website.com or whichever has the most links. Then you want to make sure your .htaccess redirects to your preferred URL.

[williammarlow]

Thank you!  Very helpful.

[williammarlow]

This is probably a dumb question, but how big of a deal is it to pick the URL version that has the most inbound links? If a client has already accidentally picked the URL that does NOT have the most inbound links, would you recommend going through the process of re-doing it so that the preferred URL is the one that has the most links?  We are not talking about a huge difference overall, and neither domain has a huge number of links yet, so I'm wondering if it's worth the effort of going back...

[William.Lau]

I don't know exactly how many but usually links are built to the focused URL the owner 'thought' was the primary URL, thus giving the other URL less links.

I would suggest picking the link that has the most inbound links just in case you lose any rankings for losing out juice for those that are pointing to the opposite.

But as you mentioned if it is about the same and it is nothing substantial you can go with your opinion.