Site indexed incorrectly..?

[mrgee]

I have one site that is not performing as well I would expect.. Now I just noticed that in google the site is listed without the www.. so there is just the domain name.. Could this be part of the problem with a low ranking and if so what can I do about it?

[dotcosecrets]

I think you should do some setting in your domain manage panel. 301 Redirect http://yoursite[dot]com to http://www[dot]yoursite[dot]com

Yes, in your case, visitors can visit your site through 2 url address, but for the same content, this is not friendly to search engine.

[mrgee]

Originally Posted by dotcosecrets

I think you should do some setting in your domain manage panel. 301 Redirect http://yoursite[dot]com to http://www[dot]yoursite[dot]com

Yes, in your case, visitors can visit your site through 2 url address, but for the same content, this is not friendly to search engine.

Im sorry but I do not understand this?? How is a re direct going to help with my ranking..?
and how can this happen in the first place? all my other sites have www in front

[raviv]

On your site, if all the pages are of the form http://www dot yoursite dot com/page
then your home page would be of the form http://www dot yoursite dot com

But if you had built the site with the homepage as http://yoursite dot com then all the pages on your site would be of the form http://yoursite dot com/page

If you go to Google and do a site:www dot yoursite dot com and if your homepage in the Google index shows as www dot yoursite dot com then this is one version of the home page.

If you do site:yoursite dot com and see that yoursite dot com shows up as the home page in the Google index then this is version 2 of your site's home page.

Google considers the www and non www version of your home page as two different sites. This is duplication at the domain level.

So you must do a 301 permanent redirect so that the site resolves to either a www or non www version of the home page. Generally users are used to seeing the www version of the site.

The easiest non techie way of applying this redirect is to go into your Google Webmasters interface for your site and set the preferred domain structure under Site COnfiguration > Settings

Google will ask you to verify the website. Once it is done, you are fine.

Best
Raviv

[ann1986]

just use google webmaster tool and claim both with www. and without www then change the setting in GWT to treat both w/and w/out as the same site.