About www - Don't throw away your Google page rank

On my blog about useless of www, coacoacoa has a point with an article from James Shaw (Cover your ASP).

I just like to write here back his comment on Google ranking, becuse it might be interested for all folks around dealing with domain names.

Indeed think twice before throwing out the www.


Everyone agrees that Google is the #1 search engine, right? It is the only place I go now to find information, and it brings 75% of the traffic to my site. So it is important to understand a few things about how Google works.

First, I admit that I've screwed up. That's why I'm writing this article, so that you'll understand something that I haven't seen written about before. If asked, I'm betting that most web developers would immediately understand and agree with this, but they won't have thought about it first:

Always use the same URL to link to your site.

Let me briefly explain. Simplistically, Google ranks your page higher in its search results if other sites link to it (read more about PageRank). Unfortunately, many "developers" (myself included) have grown fond of using URL's without the www (or dub-dub-dub as Microsoft's Scott Guthrie famously calls it).

Look at the address of this page - it is likely to start http://coveryourasp.com because that is always how I have referenced the site when I submit it to directories like ASPRSS.

The problem is, hundreds of other people link to my site. College professors quote my pages in their curriculum, students discuss them in forums. And they always use www.coveryourasp.com.

Do you see the problem? I've diluted my PageRank significantly. If you have the Google Toolbar installed (as every webmaster should) you could see this in action.
•Visit http://coveryourasp.com and see that there is a PageRank of 6/10.
•Now visit http://www.coveryourasp.com - PageRank 5/10!
•http://coveryourasp.com/default.asp and http://www.coveryourasp.com/default.asp too - all four of these URL's point to the same content, but are ranked individually by Google!

If only I had realized this problem 2 years ago I could now have a PageRank of 7/10 or higher, have more traffic directed to my site and be making more advertising dollars! =;-)

It wasn't actually on CoverYourASP that I noticed this problem, it was my OurLittleNet Neighborhood sites. I originally started by using (for example) http://ourroswell.net to link to my home town site from other places. Then I noticed that local people were using www.ouroswell.net. So I have quickly changed ALL links to use the www prefix and now wait patiently for Google to do its dance next month. Hopefully within 2 months I should be maximizing my OurLittleNet PageRank, and all will be well with the world.

2 Comments

  • Pagerank isn't quite as important as it's made out to be, it's keyword-to-content relevancy.





    There are sites with lower pagerank that score higher than others for searches - and this trend is only going to get stronger, as Google get better at working out what you're looking for.





    It should also be pointed out that the Pagerank you see in your Google toolbar atm is highly inaccurate at the moment... :)

  • You can't just assume they are the same site, because it is perfectly possible to have different content at www.mysite.com and mysite.com. I suppose google could implement a CRC32 or MD5 checksum, and then check it against the other pages in the DB and then do a full text compare if it finds a match. But, this would add to the processing time and this isn't exactly foolproof, because it takes quite a bit of time to re-index, so it is possible that the pages will change between when www.mysite.com is indexed and mysite.com is indexed. You could minimize the chances of this happening by doing a sort on the domain for your indexing order, but it still isn't foolproof.

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