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
-
ViewState and Duplicate Content
Our site keeps getting duplicated content flagged as an issue... however, the pages being grouped together have very little in common on-page. One area which does seem to recur across them is the ViewState. There's a minimum of 150 lines across the ones we've investigated. Could this be causing the reports?
Technical SEO | | RobLev0 -
Duplicate Content
I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem. My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS. The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles. It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles. So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?
Technical SEO | | Prop650 -
Duplicate Content Reports
Hi Dupe content reports for a new client are sjhowing very high numbers (8000+) main of them seem to be for sign in, register, & login type pages, is this a scenario where best course of action to resolve is likely to be via the parameter handling tool in GWT ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate Content - Reverse Phone Directory
Hi, Until a few months ago, my client's site had about 600 pages. He decided to implement what is essentially a reverse phone directory/lookup tool. There are now about 10,000 reverse directory/lookup pages (.html), all with short and duplicate content except for the phone number and the caller name. Needless to say, I'm getting thousands of duplicate content errors. Are there tricks of the trade to deal with this? In nosing around, I've discovered that the pages are showing up in Google search results (when searching for a specific phone number), usually in the first or second position. Ideally, each page would have unique content, but that's next to impossible with 10,000 pages. One potential solution I've come up with is incorporating user-generated content into each page (maybe via Disqus?), which over time would make each page unique. I've also thought about suggesting that he move those pages onto a different domain. I'd appreciate any advice/suggestions, as well as any insights into the long-term repercussions of having so many dupes on the ranking of the 600 solidly unique pages on the site. Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | sally580 -
How to prevent duplicat content issue and indexing sub domain [ CDN sub domain]?
Hello! I wish to use CDN server to optimize my page loading time ( MaxCDN). I have to use a custom CDN sub domain to use these services. If I added a sub domain, then my blog has two URL (http://www.example.com and http://cdn.example.com) for the same content. I have more than 450 blog posts. I think it will cause duplicate content issues. In this situation, what is the best method (rel=canonical or no-indexing) to prevent duplicate content issue and prevent indexing sub domain? And take the optimum service of the CDN. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Godad0 -
Canonical usage and duplicate content
Hi We have a lot of pages about areas like ie. "Mallorca" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca), with tabbed pages like "excursion" (domain.com/spain/Mallorca/excursions) and "car rental" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca/car-rental) etc. The text on ie the "car rental"-page is very similar on Mallorca and Rhodos, and seomoz marks these as duplicate content. This happens on "car rental", "map", "weather" etc. which not have a lot of text but images and google maps inserted. Could i use rel=nex/prev/canonical to gather the information from the tabbed pages? That could show google that the Rhodos-map page is related to Rhodos and not Mallorca. Is that all wrong or/and is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Alsvik
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
SEO with duplicate content for 3 geographies
The client would like us to do seo for these 3 sites http://www.cablecalc.com/ http://www.solutionselectrical.com.au http://www.calculatecablesizes.co.uk/ The sites have to targetted in US, Australia, and UK resoectively .All the above sites have identical content. Will Google penalise the sites ? Shall we change the content completly ? How do we approach this issue ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
What are some of the negative effects of having duplicate content from other sites?
This could include republishing several articles from another site with permission.
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0