Hi all..I have noticed that Yahoo has 2 listings for my home page....

1. www (dot)mysite(dot) com
2. mysite (dot) com

The mysite(dot)com listing is showing in the search results rather than the www version. I prefer the www version to show as it displays that I am in the Yahoo directory and seems to be ranked higher for relevant searches.

I put a 301 redirect in place for non www to www on the server.

Should this fix the situation?

Thanks
Frank

You should be fine with the 301.

It would probably also be a good idea to find out where the non-www is coming from, and avoid the possibility of the engines not handling the 301 properly.

There is at least one link to your home page without the www bit. It may be inside the site itself, or it may from another site. If it's from another site, you ought to get it changed if you can. It will ensure that the link text is attributed to the right URL, and not wasted.


Something else to consider:-

The non-www version is a different site to the www version (www. is only a sub-domain). If the internal links are relative, then it's like having 2 different, but identical, sites, because a spider will arrive at the non-www page, find relative links to other internal pages, and assume that they belong to the non-www site. Also, the spider will arrive at the www page version, find relative links, and assume that the pages belong to the www site. And you have 2 different sites.

One disadvantage of that is that any PageRank (I know that's Google) that comes into the site is shared between 2 sites. And a possible disadvantage is duplicate pages, but I think the engines may be smart enough to cover that.

It's not a disaster, but ideally you could try to change the non-www links if possible, and set up a 301 system to cover every page - or at least those that the engines have spidered. Otherwise spiders will keep coming for the 'ghost' pages, they'll keep getting them, and they'll stay in the index because their links support each other.

I had the same problem as inthedark, my website was listed as www.mysite.com as well as mysite.com. I decided to fix this with a 301 redirect, this worked perfectly for google..

On yahoo I will still see a listing for mysite.com, but it has the new content from www.mysite.com. In other words yahoo kept the source url but used the target content?. My serps went way down on yahoo after putting in the 301 redirect and I am now wondering if I am suffering a duplicate content penalty.

How can I get yahoo to drop the listings for non-www?. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Jean