Why does the www of a domain name affect its ranking?

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mooseboy

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I've noticed on Serpbook that my rankings vary based on whether the domain is preceded by a www or not. Why is this, and is there a way to unify it so it's consistent? I'm not even sure how one could have a different ranking since they are both the same site.

I do have an .htaccess file on the site that I thought was supposed to handle this, but apparently its not doing anything.
 
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You can set which one you prefer in Google Webmaster Tools. If this is a WordPress site, there is a setting in the control panel for this (under general settings). If you need more help, feel free to PM me.
 
If you're using cpanel, you can set your redirects to go to www or not. If that doesn't fix the .htaccess I don't know what will.
 
This is what is known as canonicalisation, and it's been fun and games for search engines for many years...

Google 'canonicalisation' of URL's and you'll read lots about it. But essentially, http://www.xxx.com is a different location to xxx.com (and so is your home-page as xxx.com or xxx.com/index.php or whatever). You need to try and use the same standards for all your SEO as a general rule.
 
jascoken said:
This is what is known as canonicalisation, and it's been fun and games for search engines for many years...

Google 'canonicalisation' of URL's and you'll read lots about it. But essentially, http://www.xxx.com is a different location to xxx.com (and so is your home-page as xxx.com or xxx.com/index.php or whatever). You need to try and use the same standards for all your SEO as a general rule.
Click to expand...

Correct info there.. Thanks
 
If you have www.example.com then:
www is technically a subdomain of example.com . But they display the same content. So it would essentially be similar to having books.com and comics.com that inter-link to eachother all over. Neither will win.

To fix it, you can set the preferred domain (for google) using their web master tools. You can also use an htaccess directive such as this one:
Code: 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YOURSITE\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURSITE.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
 
For the .htaccess file, I'm using something similar to what you have shown, but it is a touch different. I can't paste it here because I haven't been a member long enough, but instead of [R=permanent,L] it has [R=301,L]

There are also a couple other minor differences such as yours is written as: RewriteRule ^(.*)
The one I have is written as: RewriteRule (.*)

Should I just switch to your format or will the one I already have be sufficient?
 
It sounds to me like Serpbook's fault, there must be no difference. Pm lanbo.
 
Oh thanks. I didn't know Serpbook had a member here.
 
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