www. vs none www. versions of website

suarve

suarve

suarve

Soldato
Joined
8 Oct 2005
Posts
4,184
Location
Midlands, UK
Hi,

Can someone shed a little light on this.

Have recently redesigned and developed a website for client. The previous developer (who was going to do this and is a pleb) started the site and allowed his holding page to be indexed by google and the none www. version of the site to be indexed - he included his company details in the title and description - very stupid, he should have preevented such holding pages from being indexed.

So currently the non www. version of the site is indexed by google with the previous web developers details on the page.

The site is now finished by myself# and I have only just been made aware of the latter - the whole site uses www. versions of urls.

I've added both the www. and none www. versions of the site into google webmaster and verified both, aswell as settings the www. version as the preferred domain.

I've also used htaccess to 301 redirect non www. versions of the site to the www. version, submitted an xml sitemap with my www. urls and installed google analytics.

However, when I click on the www. version of the site (the one I want indexed) in the webmaster tools I get the following message displayed:

Your site is indexed as http://mySite.co.uk/ not as http://www.,mySite.co.uk/. If you want to see all data for your site, you need to add and verify http://mySite.co.uk/ as well
Click to expand...

Now I've verified both sites, so I'm confused now :(

Is this just Google trying to catch up, or have I missed something?

Thanks
 
Why do we still need to type the www. after the internet has been going all this time, any web address I type these days I always omit the www. but the site always appears without problem, I find it annoying when radio & TV programmes give out a web address & they always start WWW. :mad:
 
Good point when you have a website and you only want one version of your site indexed (either www. or non-www), is to add a rewrite rule with the following:-

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

This is important to avoid any possible SEO duplicate content penalty for having the same content on different domains.
 
Dj_Jestar said:
Instead of redirecting //host.com to //www.host.com, why haven't you developed it to work regardless of hostname? :confused:
Click to expand...

The site works with both and is online now, it's just that I want the www. version indexed in Google instead of the none www. version.
 
daz said:
Good point when you have a website and you only want one version of your site indexed (either www. or non-www), is to add a rewrite rule with the following:-

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

This is important to avoid any possible SEO duplicate content penalty for having the same content on different domains.
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I have in my htacess file.
 
Last edited:
izzy eckerslike said:
Why do we still need to type the www. after the internet has been going all this time, any web address I type these days I always omit the www. but the site always appears without problem, I find it annoying when radio & TV programmes give out a web address & they always start WWW. :mad:
Click to expand...

You don't for the site in question, as far I know I never said you had to do this :confused:
 
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