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tgorski
Posts: 75
From: Middleton
Status: offline
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www or no www domain headers - 11/10/2006 11:36:42
When creating a new web site in IIS, I've been "lead to believe" that you need to create 2 headers for a given domain name - one WITH www and one without - so that people will find your site regardless of how the enter the domain url.
However, I've seen posts elsewhere suggesting that Google would view this as 2 separate web sites, and either negatively affect page rank due to duplicate content at "2 different web sites" or split page rank between them.
To avoid problems with the search engines, it's been suggested to setup 2 distinct web sites (one for each header) and to do a server redirect from one to the other so that the search engines index a single form of the domain name.
Does anyone know anything about this?
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Mojo
Posts: 2429
From: Chicago
Status: offline
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RE: www or no www domain headers - 11/10/2006 14:30:24
For SEO purposes the issue your speaking about is called Canonicalization. This is when there are mulitple choices for a URL, but the site owner really only wants one URL to be used.
In the above examples, how would a search engine know which URL should be used? As a site owner it is your responsibility to make sure you have consistency with your site structure. The above home page examples could appear to be duplicate content to a search engine.
A common mistake that many webmasters make it to refer to the home page from internal pages by the file name instead of referencing it as the web root.
There used to be an easy way to hurt your competition. If they didn't have their site set up correctly you could start building links to their home page by it's file name. Often, sites that were attacked would receive a duplicate content penalty. There are ways of still doing this with varying degree's of success. MSN, I think, allows you to do this without any skullduggery.
If your going to redirect from example.com to www.example.com you must make sure you are using a 301 (permanent) redirect. There are too many cases of 302 redirects jacking up a site withing the search engines. There are multiple ways to overcome this issue, but the fisrt step is to realize there is/can be a problem in the first place.
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