WWW resolve

[Timbow]

Not sure I fully understand these issues but was playing with an SEO analysis tool which reported that all my sites looked like duplicate content with and without the www in the url. Used the code in the wiki for the htaccess to redirect and it reports okay now.

Is this something I should always do for every site?
I presume it's only the htaccess in the root?
Is it important? Should I add it to the wiki SEO guide?

[shawn_a]

I would Imagine that search engines are smart enough to not treat www as a seperate sub domain.

[hameau]

I would Imagine that search engines are smart enough to not treat www as a seperate sub domain.

AFAIK, Google treats the bare domain name and the www subdomain as different things – which they are, of course.

In the olden days, G's Webmaster Tools used to ask which of the two you wanted to use as the canonical address, but that seems not to be the case now.

I used to add a 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect in the root htaccess file, but now I add a 301 redirect in the site's DNS zone (in both cases, redirecting from domain.tld to www.domain.tld). Originally, this was to avoid arriving at the hosting service generic landing page.

I am not an expert, nor do I go out of my way with SEO. If Webmaster Tools shows a healthy crawl history and all pages show up, that's good enough for me. ;-)

[Timbow]

I would Imagine that search engines are smart enough to not treat www as a seperate sub domain.

You would think so, but everywhere I look for SEO info they all say the same thing, that it looks like duplicate content.

Checking a newly set up site here
http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/
I am getting four 200s and about twenty 404s, when I should have one 200 and all the rest 301s which is almost what I get if I use the htaccess lines from the wiki (actually no 200, all 301). don't know what the significance of it all is.

[Timbow]

Okay, I have done a bit more reading. Obviously google is the best place to get reliable information about google.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/an...6359?hl=en

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.... we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

Although the advice is to use 301 redirects and to 'Set your preferred domain (www or non-www)' .

So no worries really.