What happened to my www.mysite.com in Google

I setup Google Web Tools to make http://mysite.com as my preferred domain back when I first created the site. Google had me ranked 6th, but the site it was showing was http://www.mysite.com. I thought this was strange so I added www.mysite.com in my Google Web Tools and set my preferred domain to display urls as mysite.com instead of www.mysite.com. Now my www.mysite.com site is no longer ranked and mysite.com is no where to be found.

What gives? Yahoo and Bing do not have a problem with this. Should I wait a week and see what Google does before changing my settings back?

Hello mate,

Greywolf can answer your question...

He is a veteran... or study all his good share thread..

j.rama11 said:

Hello mate,

Greywolf can answer your question...

He is a veteran... or study all his good share thread..

Click to expand...

LOL, well thanks for you're vote of confidence, but as I've said in many of my posts I'm not any kind of SEO guru. I'm just good at explaining a lot of the basic principles of SEO.

This one has me a little perplexed because from the way you just described the events, you've done exactly what google says you're supposed to do for selecting your canonical url. Along with also setting up a 301 redirect on my site to the non-www domain, what you've described is how I always set up my sites and never had a problem. I'll reread your post later to see if there is something I missed, but right now I don't have any reasonable ideas as to why your site has dropped.

Ipopbb has set up a lab for testing SEO effects, and has a lot of good info about various aspects. Seo20, Micallef, MisterGemini and a few others also know a hell of a lot about SEO. Maybe one of them or another member with a lot of SEO knowledge has experienced something similar and can offer some more helpful advice?

It may be that you just need to wait to see if your mysite.com comes back up to where it's supposed to be, but it would be nice to have a better idea about it.

Piecing together what you described, it sounds as though you effectively mislead Google to believe that the URL they were ranking was actually the wrong one. You took control of your domain and pointed them to the non www. domain which maybe didn't have all the links pointing to it, or had no been crawled, so it effectively told google to reset the data.

I really do not use GWT too much or wish to know of the extent of its impact on your site, but thats what it sounds like happened.

Basically you can do one of two things. Set it back to the way it was, and wait for google to catch up to that change. Or wait for google to do it's crawl again, you will show up again soon I'm betting.

If you will change URL then you should expect it... Google will soon crawl your site and start indexing it with new URL...

For setting www or without www you should always use 301 redirect (.htaccess method)... You may also use GWT along with it...

301 redirect makes sure that url always open like you want but GWT only ensures your preferred way of indexing but it doesn't force it to do such... Some times it happens like you got in your case... May be you were linking your site with www in url and that's why it was ranking... Now it's gone and Google is confused... All link juice gone with www,

Best way will be go back to status, i mean keep using www... Also make a 301 redirect so it never opens without www... If not then wait and watch may be in few days it will come back as natural but in your place i will not such chances...

Ok, here's the latest scoop. I'm using WordPress on this site and under my WP Settings I have my WordPress address URL and Blog URL set to http://mysite.com. However, I just checkd my hosting account I had redirects set to http://www.mysite.com. So even though my webhost had a 301 redirect to http://www.mysite.com, WordPress was redirecting to http://mysite.com. Since my Google Tools and my backlinks are already pointing to the non www site I removed the redirection from my web host.

So, now everything should be in order. I will wait and see where Google places me after the dust settles.

So what you're saying is that you had everything set up on your wp theme to use the non-www url, you did all your backlinking to the non-www url, and you had gwt set up to point at the non-www url. But at the same time you had a 301 redirect set up on your host to point everything to the www url.

well that could definately be the problem.

Rather than just removing the 301 redirect altogether, I would suggest you just change it to point at the non-www url as well. That way you have each method covered, and all are consistent with each other.

GreyWolf said:

So what you're saying is that you had everything set up on your wp theme to use the non-www url, you did all your backlinking to the non-www url, and you had gwt set up to point at the non-www url. But at the same time you had a 301 redirect set up on your host to point everything to the www url.

well that could definately be the problem.

Rather than just removing the 301 redirect altogether, I would suggest you just change it to point at the non-www url as well. That way you have each method covered, and all are consistent with each other.

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Correct. And yes, I did change my host to redirect all www. traffic to the non-www url.

It was interesting to see how each Search Engine was handling this. Google was ranking my www. url while Yahoo and Bing were both ranking the non-www url.

I already see Google has one of my pages ranked in the top 100. I'm hoping I should be in the top 5 very soon.

Things are not going as planned. Google is not giving me any love as I dropped out of the top 200. I'm also seeing my rankings with Yahoo and Bing decline. Another change I made at the same time was changing my directory structure. All posts were directly under the domain. I moved my posts to fall under the category, /%category%/%postname% and Google still has some of those old pages cached as well as some of the new ones. I am probably getting hit with a dupe content slap.

Also, when I google info:mysite.com nothing shows up. Why would that be?

Didn't you 301 your old permalinks to your new ones?

cnick79 said:

Things are not going as planned. Google is not giving me any love as I dropped out of the top 200. I'm also seeing my rankings with Yahoo and Bing decline. Another change I made at the same time was changing my directory structure. All posts were directly under the domain. I moved my posts to fall under the category, /%category%/%postname% and Google still has some of those old pages cached as well as some of the new ones. I am probably getting hit with a dupe content slap.

Also, when I google info:mysite.com nothing shows up. Why would that be?

Click to expand...

Nope, didn't know how to.

I just noticed my Twitter site made it into the top 200.

I'm using Market Samurai to watch my rankings and I noticed 2 pages of mine are ranking. The links returned though are old so Google certainly has an old copy of my site. I redirected the 2 pages to the new link.

If I don't redirect my old links that Google might have how long would it take for Google to drop the old links and finally see the new ones as unique content?

Mr. G no longer lists my site. I noticed the number of pages being indexed were dropping. I changed my domain back to use www.mydomain.com and made the change on my webhost, wordpress blog and in google tools. Nothing helped. I currently have 0 indexed pages.

I don't know what else to do. I'm thinking by now it must be one of the plugins I'm using: Advertising Manager, Akismet, All in One SEO Pack, linkDaemon, SEO Slugs, Twitter Tools, Wordbooker, WP Robot 3, Yoast Breadcrumbs. I had WP Unique and WP Silo active and I may activate them again because I think they helped get me ranked before.

I was slowly building backlinks. I continued to build BL's and had somebody create for me 500-700 using xrumer just last week.

This domain has been up since March 2nd,, 2009.

I don't know what else to do.