Yahoo Site explorer: Different results for www & non-www domain. Can we merge these?

[Waplington]

When checking our domain on yahoo site explorer, different results are shown for www.theprintspace.de and theprintspace.de. We have done a 301 redirect, as we want to optimise our www.theprintspace.de domain. However, we have a lot more backlinks for theprintspace.de. Is there any way of merging the two, so we don't loose all the linkjuice we get for theprintspace.de and use those links to optimise www.theprintspace.de?

Thanks for your help!

[Waplington]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the fast reply, that's great news! We'll crawl our site to sse if everything is ok.

Have a good day!

[RyanKent]

Relative addresses are fine and make this type of change easier. The only update needed would be the base href and it sounds like yours already includes the www subdomain in which case you are all set.

Perform a crawl of your site to ensure nothing has been missed, and check any external sites under your control such as facebook, twitter, etc. along with any employee signatures.

[Waplington]

Hi Ryan,

thanks for all your help so far, we've made most of the changes you suggested. However, I still have a question regarding

- review your site to ensure 100% of your internal links use the "www." domain

Our programmer uses relative addresses in the script for internal links, i.e.

.echte-fotoabzuege.php

instead of

www.theprintspace.de/echte-fotoabzuege.php

However, when hovering over a link on the site, the full address is shown.

Do we have to use the full link address in the script to optimize www.theprintspace.de?

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

Yes.

"footballboots.co.uk" and "www.footballboots.co.uk" are two separate web addresses. The first is the root domain address, while the second is the "www" subdomain. My domains have the www subdomain set up to mirror the root domain, which causes confusion in this area.

If your two domains exist as mirrors (i.e. you can access both without being redirected) then neither domain would receive the benefit of the others links. If there is a 301 in place, you would lose some link juice as with any redirect.

[activitysuper]

Erm if the website is indexed without the www but you are building banklinks to the domain with a www will this not be as effective?

Ok,

So in Google footballboots.co.uk is indexed,

The backlinks you start building are www.footballboots.co.uk

Does this cause problems when trying to rank for 'football boots'?

[RyanKent]

The 301 redirect is the solid solution. As long as it is properly implemented, you will be fine.

While many will share it is unnecessary to update your WMT since you have a redirect in place, I do suggest the setting be updated for two reasons:

• This change lets Google/Bing know your preference directly, and they may update their information faster. Without the change, it may take a month for search engines to crawl your entire site and update each URL.

• This change offers another level of protection in case your 301 is altered or removed for any reason.

[Waplington]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks very much for the fast reply. Really helpful!

At the moment, google indexes our theprintspace.de domain rather than our www.theprintspace.de domain. Would you suggest changing the indexing preference on webmaster tools to www.theprintspace.de or does it not matter, since we have a 301 redirect?

Thanks again for your help!

[RyanKent]

By implementing the 301 redirect you have taken the most important step which will allow you to retain 90% of the backlink value. The other steps to take are:

• review your site to ensure 100% of your internal links use the "www." domain

• review all of your site's social accounts, external blogs, etc. to ensure all content under your control uses the www version of the domain.

• ensure your site's representatives use the www version of the domain in their signatures on external sites

• contact sites which link to your site and ask them to update their links to the correct URL. This is a bit touchy and should probably only be done with sites for which you have an established relationship. If 1 in 10 sites you contact remove the link altogether, or make a typo error, you can loose the link.