Member Avatar for winstanleyf1

Hi All;

I need to understand something and the direction i should go in, I have a site index and listed in all engines, it has a blog and a blog roll on it but this is the problem that i need your expertise on:

i generate links to the http://www.mysite.com but my blog on the same url is listed this way http://mysite.com/blog... my question is am i penalizing myself by building links to the http://www.mysite.com while posting new articles to the blog on http://mysite.com?

Also:
does this look like 2 sites to the search engines?
is this confusing or penalizing me on my seo?
should i link build and blog to the same http://mysite.com or does it matter?

my site is indexed in google with the www. and in yahoo without?

any sugestions would be greatly appreciated, i need your imput

thanks
Bryan

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Generated

Short answer: this is almost certainly a canonicalization / signal-splitting issue, not a manual penalty. If your site is reachable under both www and the naked domain, search engines can treat those as different hosts and may index both versions or pick one as canonical — that splits links and weakens the ranking signal for the pages you want to rank. Consolidate to one preferred host and enforce it site‑wide. (developers.google.com)

A practical checklist to fix it (apply to the whole site + blog):

  1. Pick the canonical root (either https://www.example.com or https://example.com).
  2. Issue a site‑wide 301 from the non‑preferred host to the preferred host (include HTTPS).
  3. Use a self‑referencing rel="canonical" on each page that points to the preferred URL (absolute URL).
  4. Update internal links, XML sitemap, and any CMS site‑URL settings to the chosen host.
  5. Verify/monitor in Search Console (see next paragraph). These are the strongest, consistent signals you can send. (developers.google.com)

Example snippets (replace example.com with your domain):

# Apache (.htaccess) — force www + HTTPS
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

HTML canonical (place in <head>):

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/blog/your-article/" />

After you implement redirects and canonicals, add a Domain property (or at least both URL‑prefix properties) in Google Search Console, submit the updated sitemap (use the preferred host), and use the URL Inspection / Coverage reports to confirm which pages Google selected as the canonical. If Google chose something different, inspect the signals (external links, sitemap entries, internal links) and correct inconsistencies. ()

Quick troubleshooting notes: ensure your SSL certificate covers both variants so HTTPS redirects work; avoid redirect chains (each URL should resolve to the final preferred URL in one hop); test with curl -I and the URL Inspection tool; allow time for crawlers to reprocess the changes. Once everything consistently points to your preferred host, link value will consolidate and rankings should stabilize. (sistrix.com)

(As suggested, consistency is the core fix — these steps give you the “how” to make that consistency happen.)

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for Tiggerito

You should try and be consistent. If you use both:


www.

then you will get the same page indexed twice and probably flagged as a duplicates.

There is no penalty for this but you may end up spreading out you pages "link juice" across the duplicates and reducing the ranking of the primary version.

A recent conference includes some comments from Google on this issue:

http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/10/duplicate-content-seschi10/

Some people force the use or removal of www via 301 redirecting between the two. But the most important thing is you chose one method and stick with it.

In Google Webmaster Tools you can tell Google if they should include www when displaying your websites URLs.

Member Avatar for winstanleyf1

i read the blog, thanks for sending it, i appreciate your help but maybe a small misunderstanding,

my regular site is http://www.mysite.com
but the blog for it is not.. so if this is not consistent, should i start link building to http://mysite.com?

hope that makes sense

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