site: website.com vs site : www.website.com

[chriscoop]

I have a website that has 11.300 indexed pages when i type site : website.com but when i type site : www.website.com i have 254 indexed page. Will a redirect help to get the 11.300 page get indexed and why is the difference so big.

Thanks for anybody who can explain that to me. Because google dropped me for all my keywords and i dont know if that the above has something to do with it. I also changed host and after that my traffic dropped with more then 60%. I have no idea what is going on.

[magnet]

you need to use .htaccess to 301 redirect all non-www to www
that way, google will automatically only index the pages with www

[minnseoelite]

agreed use a 301 redirect in .htaccess to consolidate your pages, link popularity, and PR to only the www versions of your pages. This will also help with rankings over time

[rob]

ummm if the non-www version has 11,000 indexed pages and the www has 254, you would want to redirect the www to the non-www. plus non-www should be standard for any website.. http://no-www.org/

[minnseoelite]

it really does not matter if you only have www format or non www format all your visitors will end up at the same place in the end anyways. I do agree though that you should redirect your format that has the least amount of indexed pages to the format that has the most amount of indexed pages as this will take less time for the search engines to figure out

It may be "common practice" for webmasters to have the non www format as a standard but if I have to choose over following standards and getting higher rankings and PR I will choose the later, but which ever format is your prefered choice as long as you are doing a 301 redirect to consolidate everything the end result will be the same

[sk2222]

make 301 to the www

[marshall_26]

I have to agree with what everyone else said 301 the pages, I'd also add google probably thinks the www are dups.

[minnseoelite]

I have to agree with what everyone else said 301 the pages, I'd also add google probably thinks the www are dups.


there is nothing that would say google thinks the www are the dups.....it goes by whichever version google indexed first...so yes if google indexed http://yoursite.com first then http://www.yoursite.com would be the dupe content...But if Google indexed the www version first then the non www version would be the dupe content.

[jeremy860]

ok so how would I go about figuring out which version of my site has the most backlinks?

also, what is that htaccess code again to redirect?

[minnseoelite]

this is the version to redirect non www to www.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

change both domain.com and http://www.domain.com to your sites domain and add it to your .htaccess file I usually put it right at the top

[jeremy860]

this is the version to redirect non www to www.



change both domain.com and http://www.domain.com to your sites domain and add it to your .htaccess file I usually put it right at the top

Thanks for that. I lost my htaccess redirect after I moved from dreamhost to the new server. That is probably why my rankings have slipped a little. :whistling: