My two questions pertain to fixing a problem on all of my websites. I have made the mistake of using both the www and the non www versions making every one of my sites having an exact duplicate. What is worse, many people link to different versions so I have a split of the link value. I have read about this issue and decided my best bet would be to add a code to htaccess to change them all to one.

I know this will work for the homepage but will sub pages keep their value? Will I need to 301 redirect them all? I guess to be simple in asking this, my site has the exact duplicate. I would like to use the www version but still have non www versions direct to the correct pages. I would like the link value to transfer on home page and all sub pages.

Thanks, John

You'll need to redirect everything. There isn't anything terribly special about a site's home page... The good news is, you can do wildcard redirection. Mine looks like this:

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

And removes the www subdomain from any url you try to visit my site through.

Forrest is right -- that will solve the problem and you won't have to do it for every page, fortunately for you

I am also agree with Forrest, that solve your problem.

Thank you everone, that code looks like what I need forrest. I will try that and see how it works out, hopefully removing the dupe content should increase my traffic. Anyone know what kind of difference fixing this will make?//

Um. I'll be the first person in the thread to disagree with a moderator. You really don't want to redirect every page on your site to Forrest's site.

The difference it'll make is that, you said your links are split between the two different versions of your site. (Same content, same markup, different URLs.) This will combine them. And it will take some time, too, maybe up to 6 months. Then, for all intents and purposes, every link anyone has made to any of your pages, will be to the same URL for that page.

Also, you probably want to kick domain.com\index.html back to just domain.com, but this is of course a lesser issue.

Lol @ Learning Newbie (the thing about redirecting to forrests page)

And I also was reading in some of the same articles about redirecting the index.php to the domain. Thanks again everyone. I was excited when I found this out because one of my older sites is PR4 on the non www and PR 2 on the www and has something like 7k backlinks (yahoo) on the non and 3k on the www, so hopefully I will rank even better for things now.

Oh, one other thing. Once I change this over (I am turning all non wwws into www. version) which should I link to? For consistency purposes I have always dropped off the www on all links across all of my websites. I would think it would be better to link to the actuall www ones now but will new links to non www pages still give value to the page or does it lose some because of the redirect. Also, what will happen to terms I am ranking well for that include the www? Eh, one more thing I almost forgot. One of my oldest websites has got sitelinks in google. Unfortunately because this was a site made when I actually didn't know anything about SEO they are horrible file names. I would like to move them to better file names and 301 direct them but will the sitelinks figure out what happened?/

Ok, forrest, your code did not work for me but I googled for specific codes to do this and I found this code that did work...

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots\.txt$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Seems similar, with some additions ahead of what you had. Now, it goes to the www one. Is there a simple way to make it go to the non www one? I only ask because majority of links and ranked pages are on the non www one. So using this, all of my link value is safe am I correct?

I'm not an Apache expert, so you'll have to forgive me... But yeah, that extra header code seems to be necessary; my .htaccess file is huge, so I only grabbed the relevant snippet ... or what seemed like it.

If you grab the condition and rule from my code and replace your domain, it should work witht he follow symlinks and such at the top. I send everybody to the non-www version of my urls. To me, it's an obsolete notion, that you have a web host, an ftp host, a mail host, and the like. I can only think of one site that doesn't load unless you type www. before it; I think people have gotten used to not having to. I just prefer the domain by itself.

Anyway, let's look at some of your questions.

You should link to whichever version of your site you redirect to. You don't strictly need to, and there isn't any dampening factor we know of for redirects, except that they take time to show up in the index. Chris Hirst knows more about this than anyone, and says about six months for a site-wide 301 redirect. If you used www.domain.com and only linked to domain.com, with a 301, the search engines will understand, but you'll have to wait for a roundabout trip through databases in a lot of data centers.

The same goes for renaming your pages. You can send down permanent redirects and change the names, but it'll take a while before you regain your position. The old pages will stop existing, so they'll drop out of the index, but the new ones presumably won't rank as well as the ones they're replacing for a while. I thought about doing the same thing with my directory structure, and ultimately decided against it.

Ok, thank you for the very helpful post forrest. As far as changing the names of my files I think I am not going to do it. It is my oldest domain so age already is working for it and the file names still contain the keywords in some form.

So I will probably lose rankings that point to the non www versions? If this is the case I may undo this as one site that I have added that code to is ranked for many long tail pages but they are all the non www.

EDIT:

Since then, I have taken the code off as I do not want to wait 6 months to get rankings back that are already working great now. I am still wondering though, is there a way to safely redirect the www to the non www? This way I would be transferring less value and I would only have to wait for a transfer of value not a new page to rank for my search terms.

Thanks, John