Ranking differently for www subdomain vs. non-www domain

[driver105]

Boy, I seem to be full of questions lately! Thanks for all the responses.

My latest question has been vexing me for about two months. We're getting ranked differently for 'www.angel.com' and 'angel.com'. Our rankings used to all pull to 'www.angel.com'. About two months ago, actually right around the time Yahoo did their big dance, for a lot of our keywords we're now ranked as just 'angel.com' without the www subdomain in Yahoo. Shortly thereafter Google seemed to shift many of our rankings to the non-www domain.

But, depending on which keyword you look at, we may be ranked as one or the other, or ranked as both but ranked higher for one, and it seems to be completely random. I checked with our network admin and he says our system is set up so that everything should be indexed as 'www.angel.com'. Is there something that he's missing in the network settings or is there something else that could be causing this issue?

It makes it tough to track, and I'm also concerned about which to use for backlinks for people who want to link to our site.

[pk_synths]

www.angel.com (http://www.angel.com)
angel.com
www.angel.com/ (http://www.angel.com/)
angel.com/
angel.com/index.html
angel.com/index.htm
www.angel.com/index.html (http://www.angel.com/index.html)
www.angel.com/inde.htm (http://www.angel.com/inde.htm)

are all considered as different sites by Google and Yahoo. Someone probably linked to your site using angel.com instead of www.angel.com (http://www.angel.com) If the site was a big site than Google most likely replaced www.angel.com (http://www.angel.com) with angel.com because it believes it's more important.

Make sure that you are using a 301 redirect to redirect angel.com to www.angel.com (http://www.angel.com) so you can keep your backlinks pointing to the same place.

[Chance]

if its bugging you then you can just add this to your .htacess

it does a 301 from non www to www


RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.angel\.com [NC]
rewriterule (.*) http://www.angel.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[St0n3y]

The .htaccess info posted by chance above is good. I recently wrote an article on this topic covering the issue and how to correct it.

http://www.emarketingperformance.com/:/667/search-marketing/prevent-home-page-link-value-linkage/