Help! www and non-www urls are driving me mad!

[ConwyWebDesign]

Sorry folks, I'm a very recently joined member, and after a five year gap in creating websites, I've decided to get back into the saddle and start again.

Boy how things have changed!

I'm soaking up all sorts of information from everywhere I can to get up to date with these changes, but I've come across this www v non-www problem in a big way.

I realise there are already posts in here about this, but each time I read them, my mind seems to slip into some sort of loop that does not get anywhere.

Basically, I think Google has indexed most of my pages as non-www, and only a hadful as www's.

I have opened two accounts in Google Webmaster Tools for both www and non-www, and declared my preference for both accordingly. That was two days ago.

As unprofessional as it may sound, I use Serif Web Plus X6, simply beacause it did the job six years ago, and it's all I know until I find and teach myself something better.

My question is this - I can only create one page on X6, and yet there are two versions indexed in Google (although not all of them). I can only amend the one page that exists in X6, so how do I canonicalize two pages when there's the only version I have access to amending? Or am I miissing the point???

I hope that made sense?!

I wouldn't mind, but I specified that I didn't want the site to be indexed yet with 'no follow', as it's nowhere near finished, but for some reason (probably due to placing Adsense ads on there) Google went ahead and indexed it anyway!

The site is either http://www.cushioncutengagementringsstore.com or http://cushioncutengagementringsstore.com, depending on how you look at it!

Any light you can shed on this would be gratefuly received!

Thanks.

Cem.

[ConwyWebDesign]

Thanks a bunch Matt! Your kind response seems to have solved it. I have re-submitted a request to Google today to re-index the site, so I'm hoping the problem will have resolved itself in the next few days. Thank you again! Cem

[Matt-Williamson]

You need to put a 301 redirect from none www. version to your www. version.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633

If for instance you have an apache server you can create a 301 redirect by placing the following in the .htaccess file:

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

Just checking when you say you specified it with 'no follow' you need to make sure you have noindex, nofollow meta tags on your pages if you don't want Google to index them:

http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

alternatively you can use a robots.txt file to block you whole site to stop it being indexed:

http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Hope this helps..