www and non www problem

[kutchi]

Hi all,

I have a site that does well in google for http://site.com and in yahoo for http://www.site.com.
The reason for this is my mistake is that, in start when I had no Idea about SEO. I had few links from sites with www and few with non www. Mostly I had with non www because I realized google give more weight to it. I have selected non www from Google webamster but I didn’t yet put 301 redirect in .htaccess because of fear to loose ranking in Yahoo.

Is it good to put it in .htaccess now? Or I should just leave it because I already did it in Google webmaster tools. If yes what should be the best lines to put in .htaccess? Will 301 redirect will give me the weight of links and anchors with WWW version to non WWW?

Thanks,
Kutchi

 

[Rich]

I'm no SEO expert but I would use the url which has the most accurate, relevant backlinks pointed to it(in my case was www). I had this double index problem also and went with www...the non-www seemed to deindex itself from google.The following is the .htaccess lines I use to 301 redirect non-www to www (redirects internal links also - site.com/file.html to www.site.com/file.html)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC]

hope this helps

 

[kutchi]

I'm no SEO expert but I would use the url which has the most accurate, relevant backlinks pointed to it(in my case was www). I had this double index problem also and went with www...the non-www seemed to deindex itself from google.The following is the .htaccess lines I use to 301 redirect non-www to www (redirects internal links also - site.com/file.html to www.site.com/file.html)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC]

hope this helps

Thanks for response

But I am afraid I will loose yahoo rankings. Even though yahoo shows more inlink without www but it has indexed 80% site with WWW. I can risk my yahoo rankings for this if its more profitable in future

 

[enlytend]

The code Rich gave you will permanently redirect the non-www to the www. If Yahoo has all your pages listed with the www there will be no change at all as far as they are concerned. And, search engines understand that when they see a 301 it means whatever was there has moved elsewhere and will make the necessary adjustments in their index.

Short answer: yes, the 301 in htaccess should transfer accumulated pagerank from the non-www version to the www version.

 

[angilina]

Thanks for response

But I am afraid I will loose yahoo rankings. Even though yahoo shows more inlink without www but it has indexed 80% site with WWW. I can risk my yahoo rankings for this if its more profitable in future

Redirecting may or may not influence your ranking. It is very much possible that all your rankings will remain unchanged. I think it is better that you do this redirect: it is quite important.

 

[kutchi]

Thanks for all of you guys, I have done the 301 redirect. After reading and discussing about it I think it is important too

 

[adeezzz]

Redirecting may or may not influence your ranking. It is very much possible that all your rankings will remain unchanged. I think it is better that you do this redirect: it is quite important.

Yeah i agree with you. you should try this