I have an SEO guy that is confusing me. He mentioned that in Google Webmaster Tools I should verify the www version of a site along with the non www (the non www is already verified). So I informed him there's no need because I use .htaccess to 301 redirect all www urls to the non-www url for canonical reasons (like Matt Cutts recommends). He tells me that I still should verify both versions.
I see verifying as me telling Google I want them to index things on a certain domain/subdomain...and the whole point of the canonical is that I DON'T want them indexing www subdomain urls! Not to mention, if every request to the www subdomain is redirected, is it even possible to verify it?
Should I try to do this or should I not verify the www?
Your SEO guy is not an 'SEO moron". You can verify both www prefix and 'non www' prefix in Google Web master tools no problem and then select which one is the preferred domain, www, or non www. You can not select a preferred domain in GWT without verifying both prefixes
Google explains this here:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231
That "SEO guy" is an "SEO moron". If your site can be pulled up with the www and without it you are technically serving up duplicate content and is exactly what Google doesn't want. You are much smarter then that "SEO guy". You're doing it the right way. Don't change a thing.
You need to verify both to prove you are the owner of both, because technically with and without www are in fact different websites. www is just a sub-domain, and can point to a different site if need be.
So you must prove to Google you manage both. Then because Google knows you manage both, and have the authority to specify what to do with both domains, you then tell Google the site is to use www (or not, whichever you want), and you keep the redirects.
Google will not index a domain that 301 redirects to another domain.
I do agree that its not nice to have both www and non-www listed in webmaster separately though. But you could in theory have loads and loads of different sites as sub-domains, so they must be treated as different sites by Google.
Related
I changed my URL from http://www.example.com to http://example.com expecting some time where Google would update. Also I made redirects in .htaccess from www traffic to non-www traffic.
However I still see est. 2500 links in Google using the www after almost two month and most of them are now outdated links so this means that the user is ending up on the frontpage.
I am considering to request Google to remove all the http://www. links to solve the 404 problem.
But is this recommended and how do I do it?
Have you tried setting your preferred domain in your google webmaster tools account?
No it is not recommended. But you can accelerate the process by submitting a sitemap with the http links to your pages and a recent lastmod date. It will force Google to recrawl these pages and notice the 301 redirects.
I have been doing blogging since 5 years back and from last year i had stopped blogging and delete the domain content. (During last year all pages are removed from indexed )
now I had purchased a new domain BlogTechie and i am planning to 301 redirect that old domain to new domain.
Is It helped to gain SEO authority in Google or I should start from scratch without worrying about old domain.
I am also adding settings in webmaster tools to inform Google for the change.
SEOs attribute a large portion of most search engines' ranking algorithms to link-based factors. It's possible there may be old links to your pages out there on the internet on other websites. You can capitalize on this if you still own the old URL and boost your new domain's ranking with redirects.
If you know some of your older content's URLs, it might make sense to have a one to one redirect to the new page. If you're using apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RedirectMatch 301 /folder/oldpage.php http://www.newdomain.org/newpage.php
Anything remaining can redirect to the root.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/ [R=301]
Check out SEO Moz for more explanation on this: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
I have a web hosting package with 2 domains pointing to it. I've noticed on Google that it has indexed the directory of one of the domains for the other domain. Is there a way of preventing this from happening.
You could try with the Robots exclusion standard but is no guarantee.
Redirect all pages of one of your domains to the other one. You can do that with .htaccess and modRewrite similar to this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
This would perform a 301 redirect (Permanently moved) from example.com to www.example.com.
For SEO purposes you never want to have duplicate content (identical pages on different URLs), there should always be exactly one URL for your content, all other possible URLs should redirect to that one.
Updating your robots.txt will definitely solve the problem in the future, but I think the question you should be asking is, How did Google know those pages were there?
First, you should ensure that a user can't traverse your site's filesystem (if your server is *nix, .htaccess should have something like Options -Indexes). And if you had a public link anywhere that joined the two sites on a single domain, that could be how Google found it. If you are careful to keep your site clean and never point to the files in the other docroot, there should be no problem hosting one domain off the subdirectory of another domain.
You can clear Google's index of those pages by using their Webmaster Tools. In order to identify yourself as the site's owner, you'll need to install a unique file (they create it for you) in the root directory of your various document roots, then you can manually update the parts of your site that they've indexed. This applies only to Google.
If you've been indexed by other search engines (and you probably have been if Google indexed you), you should try to figure out how they got there, fix the problem, move the second site to another folder (causing the pages to report 404 Page Not Found on your main domain) and then get the the search engines to reindex.
If you are using Linux, then some additions to your .htaccess file would probably work, but the specifics would depend on your site setup.
My website shows up for some keywords in the www and some in the non www. Seaquake shows more links to the non www version. It is a PR2 either way. I would like to combine the link juice of the two versions into the non www version. Does anyone know the best way to combine the two and keep the link juice of both. It is as simple as a 301 redirect and if so does the 301 need to be handled in any specific way.
Yep, you choose the one you want (without www.) and you
301 redirect the other to the one you choose. (Using an htaccess directive to always remove the www. part for instance).
The best way to do this is to use the rel canonical tag in your website. Check out this from the google webmaster tools:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site's pages. Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL.
For Instance:
http://www.example.com and http://example.com
The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results.
Visit Google Web Master Tools for information on Canonical domain and what to prefer.
I'm setting up a number sites right now and many of them have multiple domains. The question is: do I alias the domain (with ServerAlias) or do I Redirect the request?
Obviously ServerAlias is better/easier from a readability or scripting perspective. I have heard however that Google likes it better if everything redirects to one domain. Is this true? If so, what redirect code should be used?
Common vhost examples will have:
ServerName example.net
ServerAlias www.example.net
Is this wrong and should the www also be a redirect in addition to example2.net and www.example2.net? Or is Google smart enough to that all these sites (or at least the www) are the same site?
UPDATE: Part of the reasoning for wanting aliases is that they are much faster. A redirect for a dialup user just because they did (or didn't) use the www adds significantly to initial page load.
UPDATE and ANSWER: Thanks Paul for finding the Google link which instructs us to "help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties". Note, however, this only applies to content ON THE SAME SITE, exemplified in the article with "www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell or www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black". In fact, the article explicitly says "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."
Redirecting is better, then there is always one, canonical domain for your content. I hear Google penalises multiple domains hosting the same content, but I can't find a source for that at the moment (edit, here's one article, but from 2005, which is ancient history in Internet years!) (not correct, see edit below)
Here's some mod-rewrite rules to redirect to a canonical domain:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.foobar\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.foobar.com/$1 [L,R=permanent]
That checks that the host isn't the canonical domain (www.foobar.com) and checks that a domain has actually been specified, before deciding to redirect the request to the canonical domain.
Further Edit: Here's an article straight from the horses mouth - seems it's not as big an issue as you might think. Please read this article CAREFULLY as it distinguishes between duplicate content on the same site (as in "www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell and www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black") and specifically says "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."
SSL certificates can also be an issue (wild card certs mitigate this but are more expensive).
So if the cert is only bound to www.example.com, it won't validate for example.com. If this circumstance applies to your case, then carefully handling, redirects and hyperlink references in your html and javascript is very important.
If they are entirely different domain names, you will want to redirect because otherwise cookies can not be shared between the two. If a user logs into your website at example1.com, they will need to log in again if they visit example2.com.
If they are just different subdomains (example.com vs www.example.com) this won't matter.
Server aliasing can cause problems with CGI session continuity: since cookies are attached to the domain they were served from, CGI scripts have to be carefully written so that they are aware of the aliasing, or all links within and into the site have to be relative, or both - it is much harder to avoid niggly little hard-to-debug problems due to the browser serving you different cookies based on whether the user last entered your site through name.tld or www.name.tld.
Nowadays I doubt it matters. If you see both entries in google, then you know you're doing it wrong.
If half the links to your site refer to one URL and half refer to another, each URL is only going to get half the pagerank. Even if Google doesn't penalize your rank for having duplicate content, you're going to suffer.