The Easiest Way To Kill Your Pagerank
By Bryan Clark on Sep 4, 2007 in Uncategorized
It’s easy to find ways to increase your Google Pagerank, but did you know that there is a simple way to destroy it too? What I’m speaking of is called double indexing. Getting your site double indexed extremely limits your chances of search engine and pagerank success.
-How It Works-
It’s simple really. You can get to every website by typing one of two addresses. The first would be www.onemansgoal.com and the second onemansgoal.com - same address right? Wrong! Not in the eyes of the all powerful Google. As powerful as Google is, you think they could hire some egg-head, give him a $250k salary, a new Mercedes, and have him give a speech on the two different ways to get to every website. However, this hasn’t happened. Maybe someone should send them an email.
The thing is, there are two different ways to get to every website - the www and the non-www way. For some reason Google and some other major search engines read the two variations as two different sites rather than the same site with a different prefix. Why? No idea. I would guess that they are too busy counting their money to look into such a small concern.
-How It Hurts You-
Being indexed as two separate sites is a huge bummer. This can set back weeks, months, or even years worth of work if you don’t correct it early on (more on this in a second). You see, when Google indexes you as two separate sites, they also see your incoming links as two separate sites. This means that you’ll have “X” amount of incoming links to the www version of your site and “X” amount of incoming links to it’s non-www cousin.
Remember one of the biggest factors in increasing your Google Pagerank? That’s right… incoming links. Well imagine if someone just told you that you’d have to share your incoming links with a separate site that you just so happened to own. Kinda sucks right? Yeah!
This also hurts you in your SERP (search engine results placement). In your quest for a high search engine ranking, one of the factors on how high you are placed is… yep you guessed it! Incoming links.
-What You Can Do-
Decide early on whether you want to use the www or the non-www route to get to your site. I know both of them essentially take you to the same place, however, to avoid being double indexed you need to pick one and stick with it.
I recommend the non-www version. Fewer and fewer people are actually typing www in front of url’s when typing them in anymore. I suggest the non-www route because it’s a quicker and easier way to get to your site. The facts are clear, people are lazy - give them a choice between typing the extra three letters and not typing them… they generally won’t use the www.
Download this nifty plug-in that I use here at One Man’s Goal. All you have to do is download it to your hard drive, unzip the file, and use your ftp software to place it in the Wordpress plug-in file (click wp-content, then plug-ins). After that, you just activate it from your Wordpress dashboard by clicking the “plug-ins” tab, finding the plug-in, and clicking “activate”.
It’s a URL redirect. The idea is simple. Whenever someone types in www.onemansgoal.com to get here, it redirects them to onemansgoal.com. Therefore, I only have like 100 backlinks to the www version of this site (before I knew about double indexing) out of the 6,000+ backlinks I know own. I’m cool with that! I wish I could have saved the other 100, but I’m glad I found out now rather than having 4,500 backlinks to one and 1,500 backlinks to another.
What I’ve taught you here is extremely important and should be held with a high regard. You want to avoid being double indexed at all costs. Take action!
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44 Comment(s)
By Sly from Slyvisions.com on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
When I started blogging, I made the mistake of not redirecting to one or the other. I could have given myself more backlinks to the one I use now (non-www).
This is a very important tip to bloggers and other website owners out there.
By Angela on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
I didn’t redirect for the longest time. It was weird, the www version was completely non-existent on Yahoo but the http://b... version was completely non-existent on Google. I made the switch to purely NO http://WWW. I never liked the Ws anyway.
By Bryan on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
I say… screw the w’s…
By lorla on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
I don’t think this makes much sense.
Agreed the two (www and without www) are treated differently.
But Google webmaster tools is there to take care of all these things.
You just tell them to treat www and without it as a same site.
I have never seen such an issue influencing pagerank.
How can the Mighty Google overlook such a minor issue!!
By lorla on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
Again..
Would be interesting if you can give one example (I believe there are none).
By Enterprise Feedback Management on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
Seems like such a trivial thing. Why doesn’t Google save everyone the headache by waving their magic wand and resolving the issue.
By Eric on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
Very interesting point, I never thought of it like this.
It’s very important to understand that they are two separate URLs. The www subdomain (that’s all it really is) can pull up a totally different website, even potentially on a completely different network. Although it’s standard practice for www to be the same, this is not necessarily always going to be the case.
Pick one and use it all the time.
From Google’s point of view, it’s not a Google problem. It’s an end user problem, mixing and matching domain names. People think that the www subdomain is guaranteed to be the same as without, but that’s not true at all.
By Linda on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
Interesting - I never knew this but have never used ‘www’ when typing in my blog address as Blogger never indicated that there was a ‘www’ to begin with. It never dawned on me that it might work with it.
Thank you for this helpful info! I ill keep an eye on it in the future.
By shaun on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
hmm i have to agree with lorla i think google webmaster tools will fix this.
By Bryan on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
For those of you that brought up Google Webmaster Tools - Yes… this will fix the problem. However, I am willing to bet that over half of the bloggers out there don’t know that it’s a problem in the first place, so how would they fix it? With webmaster tools if you don’t specify which domain you would like to use, it still uses www and non-www versions. So even with these tools it’s possible to get double indexed if it isn’t set up correctly.
lorla - How can I give an example? Google is the only one that could tell you “Yes you would be a pagerank 5 if all of your incoming links pointed to the non-www domain instead of half of them”. This is strictly theory, but with incoming links having such a huge effect on PR, it stands to reason that splitting incoming links between two different domains (www and non-www) would definitely make it a slower process to build a high PR. And YES search engines view www and non-www as two DIFFERENT sites.
By joe on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
Good thing webmaster tools has the fix…. too bad google didn’t think up this one before hand and build the algo to take it into account already. Hopefully this is just a temporary glitch.
By James - Visualized.Feel.Abundance on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
Hey Bryan,
Nice Tip! You can also used Googles webmaster tools to set your preference so Google knows which to use.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html
I used it since the beginning and I had 0 links to my www version
Cheers
James
By Michael on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
This is a pretty interesting way of writing about pagerank, I’m tired of posts telling me how to improve my pagerank, talking about what hurts pagerank is definitely a good change.
By simon on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
having issues to activate the plugin, i click to activate then it jumps to my home admin panel…any idea?
By Ken Xu on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
Hi, Bryan. Nice post. But I’ve heard some serious issues about the Pagerank is not updating for more than 4 months now. Google seems like to erase PR industry. What do you think of it?
By Bryan on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
Ken - They won’t be able to erase PR. It’s something that internet commerce has come to rely on.
By robert on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
interesting post. I didn’t realize this was the case. In the Google Webmaster account, it seems like they actually allow you to assign both domains as if they are equal.
anyway, if I may be a bit spammy here…
I provide website ranking services.
By dcr on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
Does this plugin do a proper 301 redirect? If not, you are far better off setting it up in .htaccess.
Say, for example, you have PR3 on http://www.onemansgoal.com and PR2 on onemansgoal.com. A 301 redirect will not only redirect your traffic to onemansgoal.com, it will also carry over your PR.
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. It tells the search engine that http://www.onemansgoal.com has PERMANENTLY moved to onemansgoal.com. Therefore, anything associated with the www site (like PR) should now be transferred to the new site. (And, if the PR is lower on www, it won’t necessarily lower the PR of the non-www site. Instead, it will factor in the PR from the www to the non-www, possibly increasing the PR on the non-www site, if warranted.)
If a redirect is not reporting a proper 301 status, the search engine may believe the move is temporary and continue spidering the www site, thus possibly resulting in a duplicate content penalty.
So, if you use a redirection scheme, be sure that it is using a proper 301 redirect. If you can’t be certain that it is, use .htaccess instead or ask your webhost to help you set up a 301 redirect.
By dcr on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
Notice too another benefit of using www instead of the non-www. You’ll see that where I enter http://www.onemansgoal.com, it is setup as a hyperlink (I did not manually do it!). But, if I type onemansgoal.com, it is not hyperlinked.
Keep that in mind when deciding which version should be your main URL, especially when you leave comments on other sites that may occasionally mention your own URL.
By dcr on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
Except, of course, don’t put punctuation around the web address like I did in the example above.
By Bryan on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
dcr - I read somewhere that Google doesn’t even recognize a 301 re-direct. I’ll have to dig deeper.
By Sutocu on Sep 6, 2007 | Reply
Yes, dcr is right, htaccess is the proper way to do it. Just a couple of lines in the.htaccess file sort it out. An http redirect can of course be done using php, too, but htaccess is a much simpler way to do it.
As for Google Webmaster Tools, it says right there that they don’t guarantee that the URL will show up the right way even if you select one as your preferred way.
I think I’ll write a post on this…
By dcr on Sep 6, 2007 | Reply
Bryan: Technorati doesn’t recognize 301 redirects. Google does.
By Mitch on Sep 6, 2007 | Reply
Its funny you brought this up. I recently setup a google sitemap with whypark domain parking for one of my sites. However the sitemap lists all websites with the http://www. So I had to resubmit everything in google webtools with the www’s to make the sitemap work. Real pain in the butt.
If you feel that strongly about all the w’s then go sign up @ http://no-www.org =)
By jamy on Sep 8, 2007 | Reply
Good advice ! Stumbled.
Jamy
By Dave on Sep 9, 2007 | Reply
This is by far the best post I’ve read on this topic. Thank you!!
By Transit Man on Sep 10, 2007 | Reply
Very interesting, I have checked this on our site and the page rank seems to be the same on both www and non www, is our one ok?
By Jmus on Sep 13, 2007 | Reply
hmm….is there this plugin for blogger?
why does your blog shows pagerank 0 at my google toolbar, and also, how on hearth did you got 6000 backlinks ^? ^_^
ultraside.blogspot.com
By Jason on Sep 16, 2007 | Reply
Very interesting guys… I too am a “serial entrepreneur” and have similar, or almost identical goals Bryan, with many similar initiatives. I’ve spent countless hours on these issues, such as the use of ‘www’ or not… Here’s a great article
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001714.shtml
Unfortunately I didn’t create a following like Bryan to help me through, so I ended up learning all of this stuff on my own…. got rather far with the tech stuff (Current VP of a Global Tech Company - leading the sales/marketing of open source solutions. I also take part in the development of many technologies offered. )
The good part of this is that I might be able to explain in understandable terms.
For those of you using Wordpress, or any other LAMP based software (LAMP = Linux, Apache,MySql,PHP) you’ll have a file called .htaccess in the root of your installation. Basically it’s located in the folder called ‘public_html’ or it’s shortcut, ‘www.’ When you open this file, you can simply add a few lines of “code” to redirect traffic from http://daynger.com to http://www.daynger.com. When the bots, or spiders, come crawling, the too will get redirected. This is commonly known as a 301 redirect.
Here’s what I’ve added to the .htaccess file to make sure the 301 redirect is accomplished.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^pawnder.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.pawnder.com/1 [L,R=301]
Another BIG issue that needs consideration here is DUPLICATE CONTENT. When there is no 301 redirect, as you know, the bots see two separate sites. Well, if your site has content similar, or identical, to content belonging to another site (even if it’s yours), that’s a nice big kick in the ass from google… so be careful.
Here’s a decent site I found with some interesting tools and ideas. http://www.ragepank.com/tags/301/
(just found this site a moment ago)
In summary, it’s important to do this. And while the discussion is on linking and their naming conventions, it might be a good idea to implement SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URL’s to the rest of the site. Now, by the looks of this URL, Bryan would likely agree. Perhaps he has a suggestion on the implementation with your blog… Good luck to you guys… take care.
Jason
By Suzanne of New Affiliate Discoveries on Sep 19, 2007 | Reply
I have a similar post here, but I guess I don’t know what a 301 redirect is. Is that the redirect in the .htaccess file? What does the plugin do that’s different?
http://www.newaffiliatediscoveries.com/2007/09/increase-your-search-engine-traffic-in-3-easy-steps/
By Jason on Sep 20, 2007 | Reply
A 301 redirect is a method of telling web browsers and search engines that a web page or site has been permanently moved to a new location.
Of course you have other types of redirects that all have a specific code, but no need to worry about that now…
This thread has been discussing the use, or none-use of ‘www.’ Now, we need to choose one or the other… if we don’t, we have two separate, identical sites. For example: http://www.openjason.com and http://openjason.com
You don’t want that.. it’s bad in the eyes of the bots (see previous postings.) There’s several ways of fixing this issue. You can use some plugin that simply says, “any request for THIS url will get sent to THAT url.” If you use a plugin, it’s going to be some php code that tells the browser to redirect. The most common practice, and perhaps the best/most effective way to do this is within your .htaccess file located in the root of your site. Now, this file basically acts as a security guard to your site. This file makes the rules and sticks with ‘em. Hypothetically speaking, if you remove this file, you’re site will still work (not recommended). But this is the file where you say, “hey, any request that comes into http://openjason.com, need to get redirected to http://www.openjason.com. Notice the ‘www.’ Now, when that happens, the bots only see one site, as opposed to two sites…
By Ronald Allan on Sep 29, 2007 | Reply
tnx for this… i asked all my friends about this… how affect www and with out http://www.
By werelax on Oct 3, 2007 | Reply
The newest release of wordpress 2.3 is reported to have this build in.
By werelax on Oct 3, 2007 | Reply
If you are interested in duplicate content issues here is a good read from google. There are a lot of issues with wordpress in addition to www and non-www. posts in more than one category, posts in categories and date archives, full length posts on the home page ect…..
By werelax on Oct 3, 2007 | Reply
Sorry about that; here is the link to the google posting on duplicate content.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html
By the real proxy on Oct 5, 2007 | Reply
tnx for this now my www site is redirected to no http://www... this is cool…
By Tony Warrens on Oct 27, 2007 | Reply
Hi, i just wanted to share an article i found that should help some newbies. Search Engine Optimization And The Magic Fairy Dust
By Matt Ellsworth on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
I just use the www version for my sites. I have the 301 redirects setup to move the nonwww to the www as well as the non / version to the / version (i.e. onemansgoal.com is sent to onemansgoal.com/) I always try to use the / when building links - just to keep things straight.
nice article though explaining this.
By Leandro on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
This is a serious detail that the big Google forgot to explain us. Great job!
By Missy on Jan 24, 2008 | Reply
God its enough to make ones head spin. I think i might have been the one responsible for the loss of the pagerank over at (Groovy Veg).
Last month i went into my host (dreamhost) and clicked on a tab that asked whether i wanted to have my site directed to http://www. versus non .www
Maybe i set off a DUP CONTENT trigger to Google, when i did this. Jesus, this blogging thing can be SOOOO frustration, at times.
—-walks away totally pissed……again—-
By Matt Ellsworth on Apr 8, 2008 | Reply
great tip. I’ve always used the www versions of things - but I always make sure to add the trick into the .htaccess to make things redirect.
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