This is commonplace, and can be cured with a simple 301 redirect from your hosting company.

www.domain.com, and domain.com, are sean as different urls, so you are sharing PR between the two. To set it right, like I said, 301 the non www. to the www. it could be internal linking that is building up the PR on the non www. domain.

Thanks for that OWG,
I should get the 301 redirect sorted next week. Google seem penalise sites for thinks like this does it not?

I think about 5-6 weeks ago Business.com was downgraded to PR0 and I remember reading an analysis somewhere that seem to imply the reason was a redirect gone wrong, instead of business.com using what you suggested (301) they used something else. Were you aware of that incident?

Redirects can be achieved many ways, but most risk some kind of negative loading not only from Google but other S/Es also.

It is generaly acknowledged that a 301 redirect is the only certain (or all but) way to redirect without a negative loading risk.

IMHO, a few tidbits are true, but why continue to be a slave to Google?

I say, let's turn off our Google ToolBars for a day, come Nov 1st!

Work on your sites. Make more pages, relating to the keywords you want to target. Make the content unique, or at least unique to other pages on your site/sites. Let's make some MONEY!

Google. Yahoo. MSN.

Without us, they would have no search results.

Get off the Google Nipple and be FREE... arty:

Peace to all.

Paul

smeagain,
Which is the lesser of the evils I confront with one of my sites, here is the problems:
1. One of my webmaster re designed the site ........ he renamed all the pages .htm , previously all the pages on the sites were .html it took a while to notice this, now all sub pages has been index so I am a but reluctant to go back to changing the pages to .html , the most crucial of this is the index page. What I have done now is to forward all request to what used to be default page ( index.html) to index.htm with meta refresh tag, here are the alternatives I have.

i. Leave it as it is
ii. Instead of a refresh tag have a page saying the page has been move click here to go to new page
iii. Remove index.html (I tried this, visitors are automatically taken to index.htm but index.html gives a 404 error)
I know the best option is the 301 redirect but its absolutely not possible to do this

Temi

Originally Posted by smeagain

Redirects can be achieved many ways, but most risk some kind of negative loading not only from Google but other S/Es also.

It is generaly acknowledged that a 301 redirect is the only certain (or all but) way to redirect without a negative loading risk.

Temi, you absolutely CAN do a 301 redirect on a page by page basis. all you ned do is to tell the search engines that www.domain.com/index.htm = www.domain.com/index.html no problem whatsoever. you can run a complete page by page 301 redirect if you like so that www.domain.com/anypagerequested.htm will be redirected to www.domain.com/anypagerequested.html This is not a problem.

Business.com got into trouble as they actually put in place a 302 redirect rather than a 301 (301 = permanent redirection notice to search engines, 302 = temporary redirection) Business.com put in place a 302 redirect and left the original pages available. This then triggered a duplicate pages filter, with the old pages being removed, and the new pages having no backlinks, and not showing. This was described as a ban, but was not really a ban, it was a simple dup filter kicking in.

Here is some instruction, hope it helps.
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Creating a .htaccess File to Configure a 301 Redirect


The .htaccess file should be in the DocumentRoot directory for your web site. IMPORTANT. check to see if there is already a htaccess file there, if there is then download that, and ADD the instruction below, then upload it.
NEVER edit the htaccess in word or any other stylesheet type text editor as they create underlying code. use either notpad, or wordpad.

The .htaccess file contains two columns. The first column is what you want redirected and the second column is where you want it redirected to.

For example, to redirect an entire web site to another site:

Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/


Or, to redirect just one page to another page:


Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.domain.com/index.html


This will cure all ills

OWG

OWG,
Thank you VERY much for the step-by-step guide, I will follow, its completely foolproof. I hope you don't mind copying this instruction and posting it as a sticky so that people who may have the same problem in future will find it easily.

Temi

Sounds like youre sorted now Temi.

Let us all know if it works out as you intended.

Thanks very much smeagain