Question about www. vs no www

[lemons884]

Okay so my website is "http://mywebsite.com" but I have done various backlink work in the buy/sell/trade section with "http://www.mywebsite.com"

Is this gonna effect my backlink effectiveness and/or page rank? And if so how do I go about fixing this problem?

 

[zxcvb]

It may get treated as duplicate content.
Redirect mywebsite_com to www_mywebsite_com. (Using htaccess or httpd.conf)
You can tell Google about it here: Google Webmaster Central. Get data about crawling, indexing and search traffic. Increase traffic to your site.

 

[lemons884]

It may get treated as duplicate content.
Redirect mywebsite_com to www_mywebsite_com. (Using htaccess or httpd.conf)
You can tell Google about it here: Google Webmaster Central. Get data about crawling, indexing and search traffic. Increase traffic to your site.

I have google webmasters but I don't know anything about htaccess. Can you cover this in detail?

 

[lemons884]

I have google webmasters but I don't know anything about htaccess. Can you cover this in detail?

ah I think I got it...I set my preffered domain as mywebsite.com so all my www. backlinks should count now without the www.

 

[zxcvb]

If you are using Wordpress, just change your Blog Address URL.

Otherwise, in .htaccess, add these lines:
START FROM HERE
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mywebsite_com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mywebsite_com/$1 [R=301,L]

THAT IS IT.

(Replace _ with .)

If you have access to your web server, open httpd.conf and add these same lines within your VirtualHost section.

 

[zxcvb]

ah I think I got it...I set my preffered domain as mywebsite.com so all my www. backlinks should count now without the www.

It is the other way. Whatever you set as preferred, should have backlinks to it.

 

[lemons884]

It is the other way. Whatever you set as preferred, should have backlinks to it.

well unfortunately I have done my backlinks in both.

 

[zxcvb]

well unfortunately I have done my backlinks in both.

Set preferred as the one with more backlinks to it.

 

[lemons884]

Set preferred as the one with more backlinks to it.

okay when I do the redirect my site doesn't load. Neither the www. or the one without it.

 

[lemons884]

alright...changed wordpress blog url to the one with www and notified google webmaster.

Think this is all I need to do.

Thanks zxcvb for the help.

 

[zxcvb]

No problem man. Good luck.

 

[C.Rebecca]

Yes, it will affect your backlinks... It is splitting your backlinks between two domains. Your website is not getting credit for all the backlinks.

You need to set preferred domain in your webmaster tool and redirect your one domain to main domain.

 

[kean2]

is using the G webmaster tool is enough?

also there isn't some javascript to refer the url in case of non www urls.
(because there are people here with asp an aspx running with no htaccess)

 

[PieceWork]

I would do more than just the GWT fix.

There should be a way to do a perm re-direct (301) somewhere on your host. Call your hosting provider if you are newer and do not see an option for re-directs in your hosting control panel.