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Thread: www in URLs

  1. #1
    Triple Platinum Member hotmale's Avatar
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    www in URLs

    What difference does it make whether the URL of a page includes the "www" part or not? Does that hamper the Google Spider's crawling process?

    Just to make it clearer, I mean the difference between
    http://www.techzonez.com and http://techzonez.com

    The reason I'm asking is because I've recently added a few pages to my personal site. I browsed through these newly added pages to check everything was fine. But after a certain point, the "www" would no longer appear in the address bar (although I do not remember doing anything differently when I created those web pages).

    After a couple weeks, when I went to check if Google had indexed my new pages, I found that it had stopped indexing the pages from the point where the "www" no longer appeared in the URLs. Is it a coincidence or should I wait longer and see what happens?

    Even if it's no problem, can you tell me how to get back the "www" into all of my pages' URLs? I want it to be consistent throughout the site.

  2. #2
    Head Honcho Administrator Reverend's Avatar
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    Google spiders the content and doesn't necessarily look for links.

    With or without the "www" shouldn't make any difference to the spider as long as the links point to a true destination they will still be indexed.

    What script are you using for your site?

    Is there a setting within it where you have specified the home domain.

    A lot of the links in our front page menu do not need to be scripted with the techzonez.com domain in the urls because we have a global setting in virtua news where we can set the homepage url and this is then parsed into the pages. vBulletin works the same way.

    for example:
    our polls page is http://www.techzonez.com/polls.php but because we have already set the homepage,it is scripted in the menu as just polls.php. It is then parsed automatically so that the user sees the full url.

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  3. #3
    Head Honcho Administrator Reverend's Avatar
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    You might want to try the Poodle Predictor and compare the results for pages with and without the "www"

    Poodle Predictor

    Poodle predictor is a tool that attempts to give you an idea of how your site will show up in the search-engine results, before it's too late, and they have already cached it.
    This helps you avoid making mistakes that will either prevent your site from getting a decent listing, or will show a useless description of you site in the search-engine results.
    To do this, we have attempted to replicate the rules used by the main search-engines, as they spider your site.
    Naturally they are not all identical, and they don't make their search algorithms publicly available, so Poodle predictor's results will never be identical with the search-engines results.

    Poodle predictor comprises several different components:

    Poodle predictor's Spider view
    Poodle predictor's Diagnostics view
    Poodle predictor's Source-code view

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  4. #4
    Triple Platinum Member hotmale's Avatar
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    Thanks for the replies, Rev. I read them at school but couldn't reply because I wasn't logged in.

    The Poodle Predictor did a good job. It seems I was being a bit impatient; Google has indexed all my pages.

    I also found out a way to force the "www" to appear.

    I was linking to a folder (not a page). e.g. http://www.techzonez.com/forums/
    This way the URL would've turned into "http://techzonez.com/forums/" when viewed in the browser.

    But if I link to a page, the "www" appears.
    e.g. http://www.techzonez.com/forums/index.php

    Quote Originally Posted by Reverend
    A lot of the links in our front page menu do not need to be scripted with the techzonez.com domain in the urls because we have a global setting in virtua news where we can set the homepage url and this is then parsed into the pages. vBulletin works the same way.
    I guess it's the same in my case; if I want to link to my software page for example, I only use "software.htm". All my pages have worked fine until I tried to link to a folder, which is when I noticed the "www" was disappearing.

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