"non-WWW" vs "WWW" in Google SERPS and Lost Back Link Connection

[RosemaryB]

A Screaming Frog report indicates that Google is indexing a client's site for both: www and non-www URLs. To me this means that Google is seeing both URLs as different even though the page content is identical.

The client has not set up a preferred URL in GWMTs.  Google says to do a 301 redirect from the non-preferred domain to the preferred version but I believe there is a way to do this in HTTP Access and an easier solution than canonical.  
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en

GWMTs also shows that over the past few months this client has lost more than half of their backlinks. (But there are no penalties and the client swears they haven't done anything to be blacklisted in this regard.

I'm curious as to whether Google figured out that the entire site was in their index under both "www" and "non-www" and therefore discounted half of the links.

Has anyone seen evidence of Google discounting links (both external and internal) due to duplicate content?

Thanks for your feedback.

Rosemary

[JoomGeek]

Don't think so as Google will update its index. If it's not too much work you can do it but not sure it's worthful

[RosemaryB]

Thank you for your reply.

Do we still need canonicals if we set the preferred domain in GWMT and update htaccess?

[JoomGeek]

Yes that the best you should do and then redefine in GWT the preference for www

[gazzerman1]

You can edit you htacess file and do something like this

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [R=301]

This will make sure that no url loads without www if it does it will 301 redirect it to www also you want to make sure that your homepage / index page is not duplicated so, have that one 301 redirect to the root as well.

[hammadrafique]

I'm going through the same kind of situation these days. The client I'm providing SEO services was ranking on the 4th page in the serps. The website was having 8k duplicate pages because of www and non-www issue. I just added the canonical tag in the preferred domain and waiting for Google to deindex the non preferred domain.

But I've also noticed that just after creating 14 backlinks on authority sites, the site is ranking on first page in 5 different keywords.

I don't see any down in backlinks in WMT, I'm not sure but I think Google doesn't cut down backlinks due to duplicate pages. Wait for any senior to reply to your question.