Root domain not resolving to www. Duplicate content?
-
Hi,
I'm working with a domain that stays on the root domain if the www is not included.
But if the www is included, it stays with the www.
LIke this:
example.com
or
www.example.comOf course, they are identical and both go to the same IP.
Do search engines consider that to be duplicate content?
thanks,
michael -
Sorry, I forgot to remove the .au
-
Hey thanks Gyorgy. I'm going to try your fix.
I'm wondering about the .com.au/$1 segment.
Should that .au remain there, is that australia?
Much obliged,
michael -
Hey thanks everyone. Good info all around.
My client is hosting the site with a datarooms host, so I don't have access to the server settings. Tech support there seems clueless and "doesn't see a problem." I tried the DNS settings to no avail.
Is the only way to resolve this to get the dataroom host to modify htaccess?
thanks,
michael -
Sometimes the webhosting company has a feature for this. I have this as an option in dreamhost.com when I am setting up hosting for a specific domain.
Leave it alone: Both
http://www.compatibletonercartridge.net/
andhttp://compatibletonercartridge.net/
will work.
<label class="innerlabel">Add WWW: Makehttp://compatibletonercartridge.net/
redirect tohttp://www.compatibletonercartridge.net/
</label>
<label class="innerlabel">Remove WWW: Makehttp://www.compatibletonercartridge.net/
redirect tohttp://compatibletonercartridge.net/
</label> -
Using GWT is easy and a great help, but it doesn't affect the site itself when people come to the site from something other than Google, nor does it help the other search engines.
-
The most important and easiest step is to use Google Webmaster Tools. Go to Site Configuration, then Settings and set the Preferred Domain to either www or non-www.
Google:
"The preferred domain is the one that you would like used to index your site's pages. If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we'll treat that link as if it was http://www.example.com."If you have access to .htaccess and not afraid to use it, then the following will help:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ http://www.yourdomain.com.au/$1 [R=301,L]This redirects the non-www domain to the www version, and also redirects the index.html to the www version. Edit accordingly..
-
Hi Michael,
Let us know if you have questions about how to implement this. You will want to chose one version of your site, either www or non-www, and stick with that. Using Open Site Explorer to see whether www or non-www has the most backlinks can help with this decision.
Usually you do use an htaccess file to set this up, but sometimes you're on IIS or you don't have access to that file and need to work around it. If this is your case, let us know and we'll give you some help.
-
Yes, be careful with this.
Modify the .htaccess and redirect the example.com page to the www.example.com page.
More information: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Bye!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can you use no-index to counter duplicate content across separate domains?
Hi Moz Community, I have a client who is splitting out a sub brand from a company website to its own domain. They have lots of content around the theme and they want to migrate most of the content out to the new domain, but they also wanted to keep that content on the main site as the main site gets lots of traffic. My question is, as they want search traffic to go to the new site, but want to keep the best content on the original site too, so it can be found in the nav, if they no-index identical content on main site and index content on the new site will they still be penalised for duplicate content? Our advice has been to keep the thematic content on both sites but make them different enough so they are not considered duplicate - we routinely write the same blog post in 50 different ways for them but their Head of Web asked if the no-index is a route, which means they don't need to pay for and wait for brand new content? They are comfortable in losing traffic until the new domain gets traction. In theory, if they are telling Google not to index or rank the main site content, the new site shouldn't be penalised but I'm not confident giving that advice as I've never been asked to do this before. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Algorhythm_jT0 -
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Duplicate Content within Site
I'm very new here... been reading a lot about Panda and duplicate content. I have a main website and a mobile site (same domain - m.domain.com). I've copied the same text over to those other web pages. Is that okay? Or is that considered duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Duplicate page/Title content - Where?
Hi, I have just run a crawl on a new clients site, and there is several 'duplicate page content' and 'Duplicate Page Title'' issues. But I cannot find any duplicate content. And to make matters worse. The actual report has confused me. Just for example the about us page is showing in both reports and for both under 'Other URLs' it is showing 1? Why? Does this mean there is 1 other page with duplicate page title? or duplicate page content? Where are the pages that have the duplicate page titles, or duplicate page content? I have run scans using other software and a copyscape scan. And apart from missing page titles, I cannot find any page that has duplicate titles or content. I can find % percentages of pages with similar/same page titles/content. But this is only partial and contextually correct. So I understand that SEO Moz may pick percentage of content, which is fine, and therefore note that there is duplicate content/page titles. But I cannot seem to figure out where I would the source of the duplicate content/page titles. As there is only 1 listed in both reports for 'Other URLs' Hopefully my long question, has not confused. many thanks in advance for any help
Technical SEO | | wood1e20 -
Setting preferred domain as www or none www
Way back before panda I used to rank for certain keywords pretty well. Of course like many others after panda I lost some of those rankings. I have been getting better since then so its not that bad. I was poking around in Google Webmaster Tools and I noticed something which I need some clarification in. History my site freescrabbledictionary.com used to be indexed as a none www. Then some time ago I can't remember when I set it to www. Tonight I was looking through my webmaster tools and I noticed something that did not make sense to me. In my content keywords section for the none www my list is as follows Content Keywords <form action="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/keywords-list?hl=en&siteUrl=http://freescrabbledictionary.com/" method="GET"> Keyword Significance 1. scrabble 2. words (2 variants) 3. dictionary 4. cheat 5. finder 6. friends 7. maker (2 variants) 8. noun 9. letter (2 variants) 10. hasbro 11. mattel 12. spear 13. found (2 variants) 14. sowpods 15. freescrabbledictionary 16. builder 17. affiliated 18. search 19. solver 20. lists </form> Then I looked at my www lists and its Content Keywords <form action="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/keywords-list?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/" method="GET"> Keyword Significance 1. words (3 variants) 2. scrabble (2 variants) 3. letter (4 variants) 4. points 5. cheat (3 variants) 6. friends (2 variants) 7. finder (2 variants) 8. anagram (2 variants) 9. dictionary 10. tool (2 variants) 11. hasbro 12. mattel 13. spear 14. game (4 variants) 15. mobile 16. affiliated (3 variants) 17. berkshire 18. canada 19. calculations (5 variants) 20. coming (4 variants) </form> My none www version has the order (especially the first 5 keywords) that I want, my www version is no were near it. If I change back to the none www version could I possible see an change in rank? or can it effect it if I change it? I am starting to think I shot myself in the foot when I switched...
Technical SEO | | cbielich0 -
Duplicate content - wordpress image attachement
I have run my seomoz campaign through my wordpress site and found duplicate content. However, all of this duplicate content was either my logo or images and no content with addresses like /?attachement_id=4 for example . How should I resolve this? thank you.
Technical SEO | | htmanage0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hi Everyone, I ran into a problem I didn't know I had (Thanks to the seomoz tool) regarding duplicate content. my site is oxford ms homes.net and when I built the site, the web developer used php to build it. After he was done I saw that the URL's looking like this "/blake_listings.php?page=0" and I wanted them like this "/blakes-listings" He changed them with no problem and he did the same with all 300 pages or so that I have on the site. I just found using the crawl diagnostics tool that I have like 3,000 duplicate content issues. Is there an easy fix to this at all or does he have to go in and 301 Redirect EVERY SINGLE URL? Thanks for any help you can give.
Technical SEO | | blake-766240 -
Canonical Link for Duplicate Content
A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example: Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Technical SEO | | kchandler
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs: But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther? Thanks - Kyle Chandler0