Duplicate content

by 6 replies
7
I recently read an article written by a SEO firm which talked about the following:

"If your webiste can be reached using the www.com extension or without it at the same time, search engines will think that you have two websites with duplicate content and rank the website very low.

In other words they are saying to force either the www.com extension or force the one without by adding a small bit of code to the htaccess file.

Has anyone every heard of this?
#search engine optimization #content #duplicate
  • It's an old canonical issue that doesn't really mean jack anymore.
  • Hasn't ever affected mine but if your concerned you can always add this to your sites .htaccess file:

    Code:
    # Redirect non-www urls to www
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yoursite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • THis isn't an issue for SEO anymore. That being said, it is best to have one redirect to the other just to keep it standard. There are plugins for this, or use Jared's solution above.

    Michael
    • [1] reply
    • Instead of using any technique i would advice you to use better and unique content for your site and you will get it from better writers
  • Banned
    Back when Yahoo Site Explorer was around you could easily see the links for www & non-www were counted as different groups of links (probably still happening on Bing).

    When searching Google for site:www.domain.com vs site:domain.com every once in a while you can see a difference in the amount of pages indexed, where the domain doesn't do a redirect on the www.
  • Yes it's a canonical url issue and it can be easily fixed using a simple HTACCESS code:

    and it can be redirected for both ways as you prefer since Jared has given the code for redirect from non-www urls to www

    here is how to do it from www urls to non-www

    Code:
    RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
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    Duplicate content

    I recently read an article written by a SEO firm which talked about the following: "If your webiste can be reached using the www.com extension or without it at the same time, search engines will think that you have two websites with duplicate content and rank the website very low.