Google Canonical problems - www versus non.www
How is your site indexed?
Is your website indexed as your-domain.com AND www.your-domain.com? How can you tell? Type site:your-domain.com in Google Search (Figure 1.)
Figure 1: Google Site Search
What you should see is something like Figure 2 with a list of all the pages Google has indexed.
Figure 2: Google Site Search Results
Now type in site:www.your-domain.com/
Do the search results show the same number of pages? No, then you may have a problem with Google considering your pages duplicate content because of Google Canonical problems. That is, when you have your site accessible both under your-domain.com and www.your-domain.com.
Create 301 Permanent Redirect
N.B. If your site is hosted on the RootsWeb servers you will NOT have access to the .htaccess file.
To avoid Canonical problems you can create a 301 permanent redirect which will redirect the url you DON'T want to use to the url you WANT to use.
- Open Notepad or any plain text editor
- Type the following lines
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^expression-web-tutorials\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.expression-web-tutorials.com/$1 [R=301,L] - Save the file as .htaccess
- Upload the file to the root directory of your server with your ftp program making sure to select ASCII as the transfer type
This will redirect any request for your-domain.com to www.your-domain.com. You can check to see if the redirect is working by doing a header check which will return the following (Figure 3)
Figure 3: Header check for non www version of site
Figure 3 shows you the my-domain.com has been permanently moved (redirected) to www.my-domain.com
You should also create 301 permanent redirects for changing file names.
