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Does serving both mysite.com and www.mysite.com affect google juice?

Asked by [ Editor ]

In a recent thread Andrew Gid mentions:


“3. Google get confused if your website is accessible through both www.mysite.com  and mysite.com. It splits your link juice”

I wonder if that is actually the case – has anybody tested this theory? My feeling is that because the Analytics for the site is by account eg. UA-xxxxxxx it shouldn’t matter if the link is from mysite.com or www.mysite – it will still register as a PV – Google is smart enough to know

Thoughts appreciated.

SP
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4 answers

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michaelcyger [ Admin ]

I think Google is smart enough to figure out that http://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com are the same thing.


Having said that, I also know that there are plenty of other search engines in the world that aren’t as sophisticated as Google. Every search engine wants to find every page available, and they realize that if they display any duplicate information their lifespan is limited — as users do not want to see a page full of results from the same spamming site.

Here’s what I do: pick one. You either get http://www.mysite.com for all the URLs on the website, or you get http://mysite.com. Not both. For whatever one you don’t choose, redirect that to the other one you did choose.

So, for example, let’s say you want to see http://www.mysite.com/urls… in the results of search engines (because my mom doesn’t understand why you can type a URL without the “www.” so I always defer to her), anything that is http://mysite.com/urls will redirect to http://www.mysite.com/urls before displaying a page. In this way, you can still use shorter URLs in posts or emails that still work but search engines only see one URL format for the site.

(And yes, SC, I realize that my domain is still not resolving without the www. at the beginning. I’m working on it! Moniker.com says it takes 24 hours to resolve…which it’s been. So now I need to email them again. Ugh.)
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spacecowboy
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That may be an error in your zonefile or setup then – presumably you are pointing correctly at the nameservers so any further changes to your zone should be instantaneous – AFAIK the only thing that takes time to propogate is changes to the nameserver itself

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Łukasz jasiński

It’s a recomendation to 301 redirect from one version to another. Also it’s worth checking, if your mainpage links is always the same (ex. mypage.com or mypage.com/index.html) and do all links end with slash (“/”). I even wrote article called przekierowania 301 with handy code snippets in php and .htaccess for webmasters to use.

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dennis

An 301 redirect is a good option, but an beter solution would be to define an canonical tag. On the pages that are ‘extra’ (like http://mysite.com) you define with an canonical tag what the main url is which need to be indexed by google. Every page that is recognized as duplicated content, but with an canonical wil be ignored by google. The pagerank of the main url will stay at 100% and won’t be split down in half (due the possible duplicated content issue).

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