Will links to www and none www result in penalty?

[LukeHutchinson]

Hello all,

Normally i redirect my www to none www to avoid the potential of duplicate content and as its typically something that is done in SEO.

I don't have access to the site of the company I am working for at the moment as everything related to the sites code goes through the web developer.

At the moment the site lives at www and none www and one does not redirect to the other. I have been building links (organically as we engage on a few forums and blogs) to the www as that is how it is linked internally already and how links from the job boards we post on link.

We do however have some natural none www links and my concern is that since the site isn't redirected that it is being penalised or could become penalised because of this.

I imagine that it isn't a serious penalty if one at all but I would rather know so I can try and get it sorted as fast as possible.

Thanks.

[LukeHutchinson]

Thanks for the reply. The WWW has the most links and the http has very few. I was mainly worried about the vulnerability of this structure and the risk the website faces from negative seo.

It should be sorted in the coming weeks but for now I'm stuck with it on both.

Thanks

[wickedsunny1]

i am glad it helped :}

cheers

[SanketPatel]

Hi Luke,

You are not going to face penalty from search engine for these issue. I have the same issue with my client but I have Google webmaster access of each site. I download all duplicate html then forward to client to aware them of this issue. Most of the client provide me access after checking too many duplication errors. But if I don't get access, I check backlink profile of both version and continue my seo effort on version which has more backlink.

Hope this help you out....

[LukeHutchinson]

Thanks for the reply and the clarification. I know that as mentioned it should use one or the other but your input has helped me with determining my stance on the issue.I'm guessing that there's no solid facts on this in regards to a penalty.

[wickedsunny1]

Hello Luke,

I don't believe there would be anytype of penalty for such an issue, but yes you should finalize which domain should you use www or non www and put a 301 redirect on it.

It will prevent duplicated content issue in google and will also flow the incoming link juice to that one domain name instead of the current division of two as i see.

Hope this helps.