Google Pagerank www vs. non-www
My pagerank isn't making a lot of sense. I am happy to see it go up, but the way in which it is going up seems random, particularly as the rank of the www and non-www representations of earthcode.com differ a lot.
First, let me say that the www and non-www "versions" of my site are completely identical – they are "versions" only insomuch as Google seems to perceive them differently. The stats are:
- non-www: PR 5 (WTF)
- www version: PR 2 (well I'm happy that it's no longer a PR1)
The spread is broad, and therefore strange (the omniscient googlebot can't tell they are the same site?!). Especially when I have the 301 redirect in place? But it's stranger when you look at the inbound links (according to yahoo; Google famously undercounts backlinks):
- non-www: 1024 links (almost all from one domain)
- www version: 1700, from at least 50-100 different sites
The net-net: I have more links from a *much* broader range of sites to my www site, yet the pagerank to my non-www site is significantly higher.
I have (for some time now) been 301 redirecting my non-www traffic to www, envisioning the www "version" as the "real" site. Now it's unclear what's best – if I continue to redirect, non-www to www, will the www acquire the PR 5 as part of the 301 redirect mechanism? Or should I direct www to non-www so visitors see green in the toolbar? Will Google rectify the two "versions" of my site in favor of the pagerank 5, or the pagerank 2?
Comments
Marko Gargenta on May 26
We had similar issues with various versions of the site and redirects.
First, we launched marakana.ca and marakana.eu for visitors from Canada and Europe, and used GioIP to force them to stay on the localized version of the site. Then, we did Permanent Redirect for www to non-www version. Finally, we consolidated some URLs that have changed to new ones using Permanent Redirects.
We did all this totally by the book. I personally read Google's webmaster policy 3 times. And the end of all this we ended up in THE PENALTY BOX. I couldn't believe it. For 3 months we were on the very last page of any search results. Totally crazy. And our site is XHTML strict, and valid, has no 404s, no duplicate content, uses very friendly URLs, and still.
I did try to contact Google about this but got no reply. Being in the penalty box really sucks. We just got out, and the phone is ringing off the hook again.
Hope this helps...