Google have different cache for domain with www & those without. Why?

[icasimpan]

Hi! Good day to everyone.

As all of us know, search engines base its ranking of websites on what is in it's cache.
Usually, url's without "www" and those with "www" prefixed points to the same content.
(i.e. studyabroaddirectory.com & www.studyabroaddirectory.com are identical).
Therefore, you'll all expect them to be cached and have the same content in search engines, particularly Google.

Herein now lies my problem. Checking the cache of Google for:
--> studyabroaddirectory.com/Spain.cfm
--> www.studyabroaddirectory.com/Spain.cfm
yields different results. :eek:

Just to please Google, I made a sitemap for both with "www" and those "without".
But still, I don't see any improvement. I had noticed also that our site went up for
a few weeks last month and then back to it's old ranking(buried ranking actually). :confused:

Does anybody have the same experience? Or if you can suggest something which might
solve this problem(apart from re-submitting the page), it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
GoAbroad.com

[GuyFromChicago]

Seprate urls are treated as seperate pages by the SE's. Not sure of your hosting platform but there should be a way for you to redirect (302) your pages to the preferred url.

[icasimpan]

Thank you for your reply GuyFromChicago. I'll mention that to our Webmaster as I don't have the direct access to our pages.

Kind regards,
-GoAbroad.com

[neatorama]

Use 301 redirect instead. 302 redirects have lead to problems with Google.

[GuyFromChicago]

Use 301 redirect instead. 302 redirects have lead to problems with Google.

eeek! Yes, a 301. I was little too quick to hit submit with my last post :o

Thanks for the catch :)

[rogerd]

This is called "canonical confusion" and can indeed affect your rankings if your inbound linkage is divided between the two URLs. The 301 redirect approach sounds OK if you aren't protecting any superb rankings.

At one point, Google suggested reporting these problems with "canonical" or similar in the subject for them to study and fix; I haven't heard lately if they are still encouraging that.

While for most sites it appears to be a bug, in fact there is no reason other than convention why you have to have the same content on the www and non-www sites. Still, it would seem that Google would be able to sort out the most common situation (identical content) a bit more readily.

[icasimpan]

Just for the record, Google has it's official statement on GuyFromChigaco's reply to my original post. It's http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=3875&topic=365 :)