With or Without www?

• by Judi on Jan 11, 2006

Did you know that search engines view these as two different sites?
http://www.mysite.com
http://mysite.com

You may eventually even be penalized for “duplicate content”.

- Make sure all the links within your site are done one way OR the other.
- When you submit your site for a link exchange, make sure you use the same one consistently.
- Make sure all your profiles, signatures and any other place you leave your mark is consistent also.

If you can get into your htaccess file, point your files to look at your site one way or the other. Sometimes a simple redirect will work. For others, a mod Rewrite is necessary.

Back up your files before you make any changes. Nothing like goofing something up and not knowing how to fix it!

Don’t know how to do it? Ask your web designer for help. If they don’t know, but know enough to design sites, they should easily be able to find
the information and help you fix it. This may not be part of their regular fee, though they should know html and how your pages are put together.

To cover my own tush, this is information I only recently learned. I thought it something worth passing along. If you are concerned about your
own site, definitely do some research to decide if this is something you need to change.

In answer to the question, what is the penalty?
Google penalized a concrete number, but according to this blog entry, specifics aren’t given:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/001392.html

I googled the term “duplicate content penalized”
http://www.duplicatecheck.com/

Or “What is duplicate content”
http://www.elixirsystems.com/seo_tips/avoiding-duplicate-content-penalty.php

If this doesn’t help try google’ing (or using your personal favorite search engine) and I’m sure you’ll find something that explains what it is, how long of a penalty you may recieve, how to tell if you have duplicate content and what to do about it.

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