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I can't recall why, but today I happened to go to that fine "other" about Joomla, http://compassdesigns.net. I was shocked to find that it was an active competitor to my own blog at http://www.compassdesigns.net. It even had its own page rank!
I immediately reached for my research about canonical URL's to get my pagerank back!
"What on earth are you talking about?" I hear you say...
Try this quick test for your web site. Navigate to the two following URL's:
http://yoursite.com
http://www.yoursite.com
If you can actually have these show up in your browser then you have a problem. What is happening is that Joomla will happily process both URL's, with and without the www.
"Is that bad?" you now ask.
Actually yes, I found that on this site, compassdesigns.net actually had a pagerank. I expect people had been linking to me and had been lazy with the www. This meant from Google's point of view, they were actually TWO sits and each was getting ranked individually. Not to even mention the perils of duplicate content!
Luckily there is an easy fix. You just need to edit your .htaccess fiel with the following:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Note, in the Joomla htaccess file the "RewriteEngine On" statement is already there, you don't need it twice.
Check you secret competitors page today, you might be shocked at how well it is doing!
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Chris Baskind
said:
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Well, I hadn't thought of that. ;-) I never express my address at Lighter Footstep with the "www" prefix. If I enter: http://www.lighterfootstep.com ... the site will connect, but the URL displays as I'd like it: http://lighterfootstep.com . This is the behavior I want, right? /Chris |
Hummerbie
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No only should you redict your nor www. domain name...but tell Google also what you prefer. Just Login in to your webmaster tools from Google. There is an option called "Preferred Domain" there you can tell Google what your standard domain should be. It tells you that they (Google) "will use your choice as a suggestion to improve our indexing" |
Administrator
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Chris, You can pick on or the other and set up the redirect, the key is that you are not diluting your pagerank by google seeing two sites... |
alledia
said:
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A nice tip. This www and non-www issue seems like a problem that domain registrars need to talk about more. I see quite a few sites where one or the other isn't even working at all. |
Chris Baskind
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Thanks, Hummerbie. I'll be looking at mt Google Webmaster panel today. Useful topic, guys. |
Nick Kotarski
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It's nice to know that someone else is drawing this to peoples attention. I wrote an article about canonical URL's a few months ago: http://kotarski.co.uk/articles...l_url.html. Lots of really big websites don't seem to be aware of this problem (see http://www.rics.org/ and http://rics.org/ both of which have a page rank of 6 ) but I found one that is even more stupid the other day. Look at these two: http://www.peoplerecruitment.com/ and http://peoplerecruitment.com/ they go to different places entirely. I don't know if the host/designer is being 'clever' or incompetant? I guess that my vote would be the latter as presumably they are getting penalised by Google for duplicate content. Nick Kotarski http://kotarski.co.uk |
qwerty123
said:
| any good automatic link exchange softwares on the market? i've found one, payperlink.net it works pretty good. better than axandra. any otrhers i should be aware about? |
Mike Pittman
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Forget redirects. Do the following; 1. In the Google webmasters page, tell it that http://www.example.com and http://example.com are the same site. Then tell it which you prefer, and it will index your site the way you prefer from then on. The page ranking will be the same. 2. In Joomla, edit the configuration.php file and set "Livesite" to the exact URL you want - with or without "www". Joomla internal links will then display the way you want. You can see what your Livesite variable is set to in "Global Configuration" in the administrator backend, but you must either set it properly when you install Joomla, or manually edit the config file after install. It's not hard. 3. While you're mucking around with your configuration.php file, why not increase your security by moving it out of the public_html directory - follow the instructions here - http://blog.buyhttp.com/move-y...f-webroot/ Mike. |
Faraz Ahmed
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Actually, this same thing had happened to an html site of mine. I just didnt do anything because I didnt know if it was bad. Now,reading your article makes me think about some possible solution. Or maybe I should just let it be. But when you talk about duplicate content it makes me nervous. HOpe I can find a solution to this . bye, faraz ahmed Simple Joomla Tutorials for dummies.http://www.squidoo.com/building-a-joomla-website/ |
Mohsin Rasool
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Wow this is great article, you are right, one of my sites with www has pr3, and without pr2 LOL. so i have to insert this code into .htaccess and now all traffic is redirected to www.domain... |
Dewald - Fighting Duplicate Content on Joomla
said:
| I found a novel way to get rid of duplicate content issues, and that's to make each page view of a particular page unique. Then it doesn't matter if the same content is seen at more than one location on the site because the "copies" are not the same. I've implemented it with a Joomla mambot and PHP routine. Check it out at http://www.phpspinner.com |
Andrey
said:
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Thank you! I didn't think about this problem. I inserted this code. I hope it's useful)) |
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