'www' And Duplicate Content

[boxturt]

I was recently advised that my site may be serving duplicate content /running in parallel.

 

Your website without www doesn't redirect to www (or the opposite).

 

How can I tell if the site is resolving properly?

 

Thanks!

[TCH-Bruce]

They both tracert to the same IP address and both serve the same content so I would assume it's resolving correctly.

 

Is that what you are referring to? Or do you want when ever someone enters the www. for it to be stripped? Or vice versa?

[OJB]

I think the issue is that search engines will see hxxp://www.****** and hxxp://****** as 2 distinct entities, but both showing the same content.

 

There are 2 things you can do:

 

1) Modify your .htaccess file to route traffic to one or the other, the most common way of doing this is rewriting non-www urls to www.

 

2) Specify your canonical URL. Basically if you can retrieve the same content via 2 or more URLs, then you should specify which the search engines should take as being, essentially, the primary URL and therefore ignore the others. Have a read here: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

[boxturt]

I put a unique test file in my WWW folder only.

I am able to access it with or without the WWW prefix.

So...... what, if anything, does that mean?

[TCH-Dick]

I put a unique test file in my WWW folder only.

I am able to access it with or without the WWW prefix.

So...... what, if anything, does that mean?

 

On our servers the directory for the sub domain www is just a symlink to public_html by default, so they should serve the same content. The best thing to if you are concerned about duplicate content is what OJB recommended and rewrite non-www urls to www. I personally prefer to do it the other way and rewrite www to non-www urls, either one will work.

[boxturt]

ok, thanks!