Domains and subdomains

[melissa1]

When I started a campaign for my message, I got the message:

"We have detected that the domain www.vamospaella.com and the domain vamospaella.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here."

I wasn't sure whether I had said it was a subdomain when in fact it was a domain (or the other way round), so I started another campaign for the same website using the other option and the message didn't come up.

However, I still don't understand what you meant by this and whether it's an issue.  When I search for my website in Google, it shows as vamospaella.com when other websites come up as www. and then their domain name.

If it is a problem, is it to do with my hosting package and how it's set up or is it to do with my local site on my computer? I did  ring my web host, 1&1, but they said they couldn't see a problem. Please can you let me know how I can resolve this as my ranking is still quite low in Google and I'm not sure why.  If it is because of "twin domains", then will Google see my content as duplicated and keep me low in their rankings?

I'm new to SEO and not a website novice, so please answer in lay terms!

Thanks

Melissa

[SkitterD]

Hey Brent,

This has still really perplexed me but out of the blue as I started to think about this I think I may have come to this conclusion.  I am running my content as inline iframes, could this be the reason why I am getting the above errors?  My site is http://vortexcleaning.com any help here is appreciated and thanks in advance.

[loopyal]

Melissa,

Brent tells you exactly what is happening on your site.

The only thing I have to add is that you also are causing yourself some problems.

Your HOME link points to this:

http://vamospaella.com/index.php

So that means you are telling all the search engines and visitors that http://vamospaella.com/ is not your home page, but http://vamospaella.com/index.php is.

So you need to stop doing that. Make sure your internal links only point to one URL.

(as well as doing the 301 redirects that ensure your site only responds one consistent way.)

[Copstead]

Yes this is a problem since you are able to access the home page of your website via two different urls, with and without www.  This issue is can be resolved with Canonicalization.

More information about Canonicalization: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

From the article:

SEO Best Practice

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For SEOs, canonicalization refers to individual web pages that can be loaded from multipleURLs. This is a problem because when multiple pages have the same content but different URLs, links that are intended to go to the same page get split up among multiple URLs. This means that the popularity of the pages gets split up. Unfortunately for web developers, this happens far too often because the default settings for web servers create this problem. The following lists show the most common canonicalization errors that can be produced when using the default settings on the two most common web servers:

Apache web server:

• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.example.com/index.html
• http:/example.com/
• http://example.com/index.html

Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS):

• http://www.example.com/
• http://www.example.com/default.asp (or .aspx depending on the version)
• http://example.com/
• http://example.com/default.asp (or .aspx)
• or any combination with different capitalization.

Each of these URLs spreads out the value of inbound links to the homepage. This means that if the homepage has multiple links to these various URLs, the major search engines only give them credit separately, not in a combined manner.