Www.mydomain.tld same as mydomain.tld - unexpected results

[PandyLegend]

Hi

I set up a campaign to monitor a website and chose to track the root domain, however the report showed every single page on my website was duplicated with itself when seen as www.mydomain.tld as opposed to just  mydomain.tld.

I deleted the campaign and set it up to monitor only the www.mydomain.tld as I don't use any other subdomains, however in Bing results the website is listed without the www and so is not recognised in the ranking checker.

How can I set it up so that seomoz recognises the pages as the same either with or without the www?

[RobertFisher]

Excellent response THB. We do both for all sites.

[DanHill]

Hi Pandy

Set your htaccess file to redirect all non www variants to the www ones (or vice versa depending on which you'd prefer).  That should prevent the seoMoz 'bot' from reaching the 'wrong' ones(and also make sure search engines don't too.

On a side note - if Bing has your pages cached without the www and you want to go with the www variants then I suggest you first do a 301 redirect of all the pages and the domain itself so you don't lose out on any traffic and links built etc

Edit : going to leave my reply even though it seems THB beat me too it(only just though!)

[THB]

To handle this you need to setup a permanent redirect from mydomain.tld to www.mydomain.tld (or vice versa).

If your site is running Apache you can use a .htaccess file do handle this.

Simply create a file called .htaccess (make sure when you save the file you are not saving it as .txt as that with append the .txt to the file like so: .htaccess.txt which you do not want; save as 'All Files' or whatever), and save it to your public_html directory, or whatever your web root is.

Add the following:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.tld$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.tld/$1 [L,R=301]

That should now effectively keep your site from being broken into 2.

Google also recommends you create two(2) Profiles within Google Webmaster Tools, one for the www. and one for the non www. where you can then specify under "Site Configuration > Settings > Preferred Domain" which method you have chosen as per your .htaccess file.

Hope that answers your question.