Links with www and without
On Feb. 27, 2004 I was just beginning to understand that search engines were dumb enough to consider to identical sites to be different sites if they had different urls:
Here’s a good explanation of the problems that can arise from having links to “http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/” and “http://seo-search-engine-ranking.com/”.
The problem arises because search engines think they’re looking at different URLs and therefore different sites. Most webmasters can use a .htaccess file to solve the problem. It’s all here.
The answer is a bit of htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
The new version of that old article is here: Canonicalization Errors
Now, of course, duplicate content is a huge issue. Webmasters with content have trouble protecting it from those who want to steal it. Search engines don’t know which sites to point to because they don’t know who the content really belongs to.
The old issues are, as far as I know, still problematic. I haven’t heard that having links to http://www.site.com and http://site.com will combine their link popularity - if they don’t then you need all the links pointing to just one site in order not to dilute link juice. Since you don’t control the links on other people’s sites, the htaccess code is the way to go.
Tags: htaccess, http://, link popularity, www
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Never really thought about it till now. I am using WWW prefix so if its good with Google, ok .My page rank seems to be same both ways.