Google isn't displaying the www. for my site in the SERPS
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I noticed that every other site url in the serps for my main keywords has a www. on their display url except mine. I have the site set to display the www.
Can this potentially hurt my SEO and what can I do to fix this?
Thanks Aaron.
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Hi Aaron,
Your 301 redirect is working fine and sending all non www traffic to your www subdomain, so there is no harm to your SEO. The potential for that was explained by Ed in his reponse.
Google has simply indexed your non www root domain before you put the 301 redirect in place and has not picked up the redirect and adjusted the index as yet.
If you have not already done as Nico suggested and advised Google in your Webmaster Tools account which is your preferred domain, then you can do this. It is likely to enable Google to pick up the 301 more quickly, although I have heard Googlers refer to it as a "hint" which means that you should not hold your breath, or be overly concerned if you do not see a change in the results page straight away.
Bing also has the same function in Webmaster Central.
Sha
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its an either or, or both. When you have both sites that have links to them ( domain and pages with and without www)
google thinks there are two domains there, and splits the link juice. You can tell if its a problem by using the google operator "site:domain.com" and site:www.domain.com ( sub your own domain name there) to see if you have both types indexed.
If you do have that problem ( the "canonical problem") then you can use a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file ( if you have an apache web server), or if you have a windows web server, then you have to use a few programs in your root directory to accomplish the same thing - to let google know there is only one site. The 301 redirect is a 'permanent' redirect, and hopefully all the link juice one domain has will transfer to the other. You only go to the webmaster tools after you have done the above. -
You can choose wich one do you want as "home".
1 way: Go to your google.com/webmasters/tools account--->site information--->Setting
there you can set your preffered domain.
2 way: Set your htacces as you like. http://davidwalsh.name/no-www-using-htaccess-file
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