Google not picking up my site with www?

[treezie]

I have a weird problem. I was trying to see if my site was sandboxed by Google. So what I did was type in site:www[dot]mysitename[dot]us and nothing appeared. So I was like WTF for a few minutes. Then I tried the search site:mysitename[dot]us and all my indexed pages appeared. What gives? When I tried the same thing with other sites, all their pages showed, with or without www.

And on a sidenote, any other suggestions to see if my site is being sandboxed or not? The articles on my site are on-page optimized for the keywords I'm going for with url, H1 tags, metatags, metadescriptions, and keywords within the articles, but only 2 of my 10 articles are in the top 1000 (according to Market Samurai). Is this just natural with a competitive niche?

[jtribe]

everyone has their site disappear sometimes - it could be that you have to wait a few hours and try again.

[MrStinky]

Originally Posted by jtribe

everyone has their site disappear sometimes - it could be that you have to wait a few hours and try again.

remove www, just try site:[domain.tld]

[treezie]

Originally Posted by MrStinky

remove www, just try site:[domain.tld]

I did that and it works without the www. But why is that though?

[Ethan Ooi]

hi, when u started ur website, u have to determine whether u want w ww or without w ww on ur domain.

sometimes, google may view the domain with w ww and without w ww as mirror contents and sandboxed one of them, but as time passed, with more backlink or whatsoever, both of them may be appear indexed.

but for good seo practice, usually, most will choose either they want w ww or without w ww.

u can do this by using mod rewrite on robots to redirect the one without w ww to the one with w ww or vice versa

if your site is in wordpress, you can even do this simply by changing the domain url in the setting.

then, u might need to add both url with and without www to google webmaster tool and change the setting to show w ww or without ww w.

then when u build backlink for your site using anchor text or whatsoever, always stick with the url u have choosen either with w ww or without ww w.

[roadwarriorhawk]

If you want to change how google recognises your site you can do so in google webmaster tools. There you can specify your preference over with www., or without www.

Doing a site:youdomain won't determine if your site has been sandboxed or not either. That would just determine what pages are indexed or not.

If you want the other pages on your site indexed try promoting them to a couple of social bookmarking websites.

[dburk]

Hi treezie,

You have what is known as a canonicalization issue. If your website will return the same page content for www and non-www then this is seen as duplicate content by the search engine. They will then select one version to index and filter the other URLs as duplicate content.

You should pick one version, www or non www, and stick with that version. Use a 301 permanent redirect to always point at the canonical version of your choice.

See: Preferred domain (www or non-www) - Webmaster Tools Help

[leo.prash]

i think u might have registered without www

[socialbookmark]

Originally Posted by leo.prash

i think u might have registered without www

When you register a domain, you registered both kinds of it. So its not related to it. He should redirect non www version to www one, using 301 redirect. Then it works as he wants.

[treezie]

Originally Posted by socialbookmark

When you register a domain, you registered both kinds of it. So its not related to it. He should redirect non www version to www one, using 301 redirect. Then it works as he wants.

So you're saying that I should go into my cpanel and do a 301 redirect and direct mysite[dot]us to www[dot]mysite[dot]us?

Just last night, I went to Google webmaster and chose the one without www if that makes a difference.