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301 Redirect From Non-WWW to WWW Hurts One Webmaster

A WebmasterWorld thread tells the story of one Webmaster who, a year ago, was doing very well in the Google results. He then took the advice of Google to redirect the non-www version of his site to the www version (ie. http://seroundtable.com/ --> http://www.seroundtable.com/). After doing that, Google dropped his pages from his site. He waited 10 months! 10 months, for Google to get the clue that he wants the www version index, but they never got it. So he decided to drop the 301 redirect he hand in place and presto, he is back in the results, two weeks later, like he was 10 months prior. Wow.

WebmasterWorld members, admins and moderators quizzed the member on what he did and it seems like he did everything by the book.

Just one more tail of Google's canonical URL issues?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.



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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at July 13, 2006 8:36 AM Comments (3)

Comments

I believe the same to be true.

 

If Google had all the non-www URLs indexed and ranking, then yes, you'd probably loose a lot of rankings. However, if they didn't get better in a few months, I'd say that Google is having 301 issues and may need a tune up.

 

My guess is that there were more inbound links going to the non-www than the www which had Google taking a long time to figure that out. But that is just my guess. Still Google should have updated itself with the 301 in place.

 

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