Home Page Question - having www in URL or not

agrahlma · Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 10

Recently I noticed the following:

My index page was listed in Yahoo as http://mydomain.com (missing www) rather than http://www.mydomain.com; with all of the sub-pages listed as URL's only.

Google (pr3) all pages indexed, but home page not listed.

While going through my website I noticed that some of my links (to the home page) were listed as /index and some as /. I've seen some blogs which indicate that crawlers will sometimes view this as two different pages; resulting in a penalty to the site for duplicate content. Is that a true statement?

thanks, Allen

coop99 · Joined: 30 Jul 2005 Posts: 198 Location: Seattle, WA

Yes, there can be several versions of one page, for instance...

http://www.a-companyname.com/index.???
http://www.a-companyname.com/
http://a-companyname.com/index.???
http://a-companyname.com/

...are all the same page. If all these pages were indexed you may encounter dup content penalties or less rank based on similar pages already in the index.

You want to make ALL the links the same on your site so the crawlers do not get confused when indexing your site. Yahoos crawler is not that good at sorting the urls out itself so it's best if you do it for them and other bots.

You want to do some searches on 301 redirects if you cannot just change all the links within your site to reflect ONE version of your urls.

So if you choose the homepage to be http://www.a-companyname.com/, make the rest of the links like this...
http://www.a-companyname.com/page1.??? and not http://a-company.com/page1.???. Just make them all the same or redirect them all to one version permanently.
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coop99 · Joined: 30 Jul 2005 Posts: 198 Location: Seattle, WA

agrahlma · Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 10

Thanks Coop,

Last night I corrected my links so that they all point to one home page (index) address. Do I still need to add a 301 redirect at this point? If so, where would I place it?

You're right about credit card sites...this is my first website and it appears that I jumped into one of the more difficult industries.

No big deal…It's a new hobby at this point, and I'm having fun and learning a lot - not looking to make mega bucks off the site.

By the way from your viewpoint, does my site appear to be penalized in Yahoo or Google?

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate that you've taken the time to reply to my questions!!!

-allen

coop99 · Joined: 30 Jul 2005 Posts: 198 Location: Seattle, WA

Allen-

coop99 · Joined: 30 Jul 2005 Posts: 198 Location: Seattle, WA

agrahlma · Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 10

Thanks…I'll give Google some time.

On the Yahoo side, the thing that still concerns me is this -- several pages which are listed with www. are no longer valid pages on my site (404 not found). This does not surprise me as I deleted some pages early in the site development. I still have this weird feeling that I'm banned/penalized. I've sent them some e-mails asking questions, and they responded promptly asking for my URL. In each case, I never received a response (after I sent the URL). My gut is telling me that they just delete e-mails from people who have banned or penalized sites. Note: It is worth mentioning, that I've never actually submitted my site for re-indexing (I think Yahoo gives you one shot), as I cannot be entirely sure that anything is wrong (aside from my corrected homepage error).

Sorry for the run-on, but the other twist is that MSN is not having any problems with my site at this time.

I suppose the best thing for me to do is sit back and wait.

Again, thanks for taking the time to respond!!!

-Allen

agrahlma · Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 10

coop,

It appears that google has captured my updates, as my index page is now listed with the www. (also without the /index).

thanks again for the help!

-Allen