Redirecting non-www to www

[rylaughlin]

Hi all,

I recently ran my first diagnostic test with SEOmoz and was alarmed to find my company's site has over 8,000 cases of duplicate content, virtually all of which can be attributed to separate domains, www vs. non-www.

So after some research I found that this can be solved easily using .htaccess. However I found a warning on another site that if my site has already been indexed by Google without the www, there could be side effects like a loss in PR.

Can anybody tell me how to find out whether my site falls into this category? I do have access to Google Webmaster tools but I can't find anywhere that tells me how my site's been indexed.

Thanks in advance.

[jesse-landry]

well you can find out how it's been indexed by typing in your domain. For example, if your domain is www.whoopsee.com then google "whoopsee" and see what it returns.

Regardless, this doesn't matter. What you NEED to do is simply do a redirect. Choose one, www or non-www. I prefer www but others prefer other things. It is not going to hurt you if you perform this redirect right this second, no matter what Google has indexed. If you do NOT perform the redirect... THAT is what will hurt your site.

So.. don't delay and don't worry! You will find that things will improve. Keep this in mind - performing a 301 redirect will pass link juice. Meaning if you point domain.com - www.domain.com then all previous links pointing to domain.com will pass juice to the new permanent redirected www.domain.com

Does this make sense?

Long story short - Your site will not be worsened by this redirect. It will be benefited. Because right now, Google sees them as two different sites and they are competing against eachother and link juice is split between them. Join like Voltron and move forward!

[ThompsonPaul]

If you want to see the true effect of this "split" you can use Open Site Explorer to check the incoming links of each version of the URL. If there's a major difference, pick the version with the  most incoming links as your primary (or canonical) version. Then redirect the secondary version to that URL. Like Jesse, I almost always find the www version is the better one to make primary.

There's no reason not to do this redirecting, and every reason to do it. You may find the rankings fluctuate a little for a day or 2 as the search engines update themselves. But if you don't do this, you essentially have your two sites competing against each other and splitting their value between them. Which means other sites will outrank you even though their "score" is lower, because your score has been split.

Google Webmaster Tools can also tell you this info very effectively, but to get it you're going to have to create a second site inside your GWT account. When you set up your existing GWT site, you used either the www.example.com or non-www version of your website. Whichever address you chose, that is the ONLY index data provided in that GWT site.

As further proof search engines consider them separate sites, the only way to check the other version of your URL is to actually create a whole new site (in the same GWT account) using the other URL version as the setup address.

When on your main dashboard, you'll see a red button in the top right corner for **Add a Site.  **Use the URL that's different from the one you used the first time. Then set up and verify as normal. You can use the same verification method you used the first time -most often just using your Google Analytics account to verify is easiest, but if you uploaded a special file or are using the header snippet, those will work again too.

Once you've got the second site set up, you will be able to compare the indexing and incoming links reports to see the differences between the two versions as Google sees them.

Last benefit of setting up both sites - you can now use the GWT tools Configuration -> Settings to tell Google which version of the site is your Preferred Domain. (you can only do this properly if you have both site versions set up) Set the same version of the preferred domain in both versions of the site and you'll give Google a second indicator for which version of your domain is the primary.

Hope that makes sense?

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

Agree w/ what Jesse's saying here, but need a little tidy on his description of how to look at how Google sees the addresses differently. You'll need to Google www.whoopsee.com and then whoopsie.com (note the .com needs to be included both times). Otherwise you're doing a keyword search, not a domain name search.

In fact, the best way to do these is to do a search for site:www.whoopsie.com and then site:whoopsie.com. That will limit the search results to actual URLs from only your own site.

Paul

[jesse-landry]

You're absolutely right, Paul. Thanks. Sometimes I forget that people's domains are more broad than the ones I work with. (I'm permitted to be lazy in this regard, but should not encourage such laziness.)

Onward!

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Ryan, you've received some great responses here. Did they answer your question?