To WWW or Not to WWW?

SEO tips

Just the other day I was reviewing a website. I typed “site:www.thedomain.com” into Google, and it showed 80 pages had been indexed. Good! Then I typed in “site:thedomain.com”, and only 4 pages had been indexed! Why the discrepancy?

Search engines may index two versions of a site (the www version and non-www version), and then penalize the site for duplicate content!

How can such a thing happen? Well, if the bot hits a link that it indexes the page without the “www” and site’s internal linking structure uses relative links instead of absolute links, Google now has two copies of the site in the index and views them as separate sites with duplicate content.

Because Google hates duplicate content so much, since it uses room on their servers, they will downgrade or penalize pages that are essentially duplicates of others it has already indexed. Even though Google may perceive the sites as being different, because they originate from the same domain, Google discounts both versions, and rankings suffer because of this. In fact, some webmasters have called this phenomenon the “Slow Site Death.”

The good news is there is an easy fix to this internal duplicate content problem. All you need to do is a 301 permanent redirect from the non-www version of your domain to the www version. If your site is on a Linux server, this is fairly simple to accomplish. First of all, call your webhost and make sure the Apache Rewrite Module is turned on. Then put the following code into your .htaccess file. Be sure to change “thedomain.com” to your domain name.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thedomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.thedomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

If your site is on a Windows server, you do not have an .htaccess file, so we suggest that you contact your hosting provider and request they make the change for you. Basically, they need to add the following ASP code to the default home page for “http://thedomain.com” (your domain name).

< %@ Language=VBScript %>
< %
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”, http://www.thedomain.com
%>

In either case, to test whether your non-www URL is redirecting to your www URL, just type “yourdomain.com” into your browser without the “www” and it should redirect to “www.yourdomain.com”.

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admin @ March 27, 2008