http://www.yoururl.com versus http://yoururl.com

site.com and http://www.site.com are different (even if they happen to be the same). www is technically a subdomain. You could put different content on each. The fact that hardly anyone does doesn’t really matter.

You should make sure all your links go to one or the other. If you have them going to both, you risk your pagerank being split in two, your rankings being divided between the two, and even duplicate content problems.

Bottom line, it can matter a lot (though it might only matter a little to most sites) and most basically, there is zero advantage to it so you should do what you can to be consistent.

crap…okay duhh….hence the reason why when you login to your FTP you are in PUBLIC_HTML and then there’s also a www folder outside the parent folder! GRR im such a dingbat.

Do you think if I start being consistent with using www. and change my links where I can that eventually it will fix itself on google and stufF? I havent even got this page ranked very high yet though I do have it linked to a few pages….

No, there’s likely no connection with having both a ‘www’ and a ‘public_html’ folder. You’re probably set up so that these two directories are actually one and the same. That is, www is probably a soft link to public_html.

If you actually wanted to have site.com and http://www.site.com be different content, your webserver software would need to be configured differently to make that happen.

Okay, Gotcha….

Thanks BJ for clearing that up! ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

ok, I have been wrestling with this, too. classics was telling me I had different data on the www vs. no www and my PR was getting split.

I think it came from an oversite on my part. I use smartftp and when I ftp, I never really paid much attention to the address I poked in.

I usually used http://www.coloradogamblingforum.com

Then my host had some server issues and I was having problems ftping… I was trying different things and at one point, I dropped the www.

this uploaded everything to a different place and basically duplicated my website.

then as I made updates, the non “www” page was not getting updated. this made two similar pages. I didn’t notice because they are SO similar. One was the same as the other without small updates here and there.

This is only a theory, if someone can verify this is what I did to myself or it sounds correct, let me know please….

thanks,
Bernie

PS: to test my theory I deleted my index.php file on the coloradogamblingforum.com and it’s showing the directory structure instead of loading the file.

the www. version still loads my website fine.

but now, HOW do I make the non .www load the real page? it’s showing directory structure now???

thanks !? help ?!

You should be able to do what you want with an .htaccess file that redirects the non-www to the www version.

I think this should do it:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^coloradogamblingforum.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.coloradogamblingforum.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Just copy and paste this into a text file, name it .htaccess and upload it to the public_html or equivalent directory. All it does it says to visitors and search engines that coloradogamblingforum.com has permanently moved to http://www.coloradogamblingforum.com .

This will sort out the other guy’s problem of getting links to the www and non-www versions of his site as well. It will also ensure that Google passes the proper amount of PageRank.

There is another format that can be used to accomplish the same thing.

It’s a basic 301 redirect that is placed in the .htaccess file. If you dont have an .htaccess file then create it as a text document and place it on the root directory for your site.

If you have this file already, scroll down to the bottom of the code, miss a line and use the following syntax:

redirect 301 /current/currentname.htm http://www.you.com/newfolder/newname.htm

To redirect an entire site you would use:

redirect 301 /http://www.newsite.com/

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Kevin 11

thanks, it all worked out for me.

most of my confusion it turns out was simply because the server got moved, but this solved my problem of duplicate page content (I hope!)

Bernie

ha! it was working last night but now when I goto

coloradogamblingforum.com (with no www.) it says:

The document has moved here.

---

Apache/1.3.31 Server at http://www.coloradogamblingforum.com Port 80

instead of re-directing…

any help appreciated on this…

Can you redirect a specific directory from your control panel? I have that option by just adding the /whatever and then typing the redirect. But I have no idea if tahts what we’re even talking about LOL