Confused with www versus non-www domain names

29 Oct 09 9:09 am

I am sure that you will find this lesson on URL Canonicalization useful :)

29 Oct 09 12:03 pm

I, in the post about the URL Canonicalization Lesson, wrote:for search engines, http://www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com are not the same. In searches, people (especially those who do not know of your site, in fact, those who already know of your site would most probably not be searching but go to your website directly ) do not necessarily type in http://www.mydomain.com or mydomain.com. They usually type in queries for whatever they are searching for. If your keywords fit their query terms, your listing will appear, but only one (either domain.com or http://www.domain.com) will be listed in the search results. That's how search engines are. Because search engines think that the www and non-www addresses are different from each other, they treat one as having duplicate content and will not display it in the listing.

Also, Google will not merge the results.

So you really need to put in the 301 redirect and that applies to everyone

30 Oct 09 9:33 am

Hey Mark and Fara,

Thank you very much yet again for taking the time out to help me, I made sure the change as Mark specified above is in place, the redirect seems to be working okay now.

I noticed when I did a search using the "site" command, I get the following message:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

Can I assume therefore that I've been "penalized" by G and that some of my results are in the supplemental index? (I researched with the omitted results included and there was a mix of www. and non-www pages.)

Do you know if this will have a long-term effect on my site page rankings or should everything be fixed and "synchronized" when G reindexes my site and sees that the 301 redirect is now in place?? I'm assuming G is treating this as duplicate pages - even of course they are not and it's all originating from the my single site.

I find it interesting that when registering a domain in say GoDaddy it's system won't let you specify "www" as a prefix before your nominated domain name. So if you want "www.example.com" you have to buy "example.com". I realize what you're saying that the S.Engines treat non www and www domain names as different domains but I just can't see the logic in the way they operate like that given it's impossible to register, say http://www.example.com and example.com as different domains in the first place. They're one and the same from the point of view of registering and buying your domain. I thought the S. Engines might be a bit more intelligent about that fact.

Thanks again everyone for your continued help

Regards
Paul D.

25 Feb 11 6:49 am

Ugg, I did not realize I was making this mistake.

I'm a little confused about doing the 301 redirect. I'm using dreamweaver to build my site, and my affiliate site is an add-on domain to another domain I already have hosting for. I don't have a .htaccess file in my root folder for my affiliate site (but maybe it's there for my wordpress-hosted blog on my primary domain?).

Also, is there any disadvantage to having http://mysite.com as opposed to http://www.mysite.com? I've already made a bunch of backlinks for the former, and I don't want to lose those if I switch over. That video link that faradina posted seems to say just choose one and stick with it, but then it seems other people are preferring to have the www prefix.

25 Feb 11 8:00 am

Ah okay, my page already redirects (so if I type in mysite.com or www.mysite.com, I end up at the same place)- so I'm good?

Thanks for being so helpful!

25 Feb 11 4:53 pm

there are several actually Joshua. I use Simple 301 Redirection myself. but, she already said she is using Dreamweaver to build her site, so wp plugins wont really help.

Elana, as long as you have that redirect already, you are good. just make sure that as you build links you always use the same version, and you will be okay.