Silly question about how Google is indexing my site
 

Hello,

This is probably a silly question for all you SEO gurus.

I recently noticed that some of my sites, when they are listed on the Google results, it shows http://url.com/ instead of http://www.url.com/

Do you guys know why this happens? Is there a way to change it?

You can change this via Google Webmaster tools.

What he said... also it doesn't really matter either way.

Yeah, I know it doesn't matter. But this is actually for a customer of ours. And this guy is actually complaining about it!! Can you believe it??

Thanks guys, found it.

Let's see how long it takes to start working now...

google sees url.com and www.url.com as two different sites using exactly same content plus there may be an issue with spreading link juice on both domains instead of concentrating it in one. it makes sense to have SEs index only one domain and another redirect to it

In case anyone else is interested: http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

Are google STILL doing that?

Make sure you chose to use either with or without the www and stick to it. Then set the preferred domain in Google webmasters tools, next 301 whichever one you aren't using to the one you are. Job done - charge client another $1k. :-)

to be honest i'm not sure ever since it's possible to indicate in G's Webmaster Tools whether you want to use www or not (obviously this doesn't solve it for other SEs) but at the same time i would be surprised finding out that G treats url.com and www.url.com as one. which one would they default to, one that has more inbound links than the other one?

members.site.com and site.com are normally different, of course, so google will ready them as different. I'm pretty sure Google's engineers, some of the smartest IT people in the world, have figured out that www.site.com and site.com are the same 99.999% of the time, though, and accounted for that. It's not 1995 anymore. If someone has proof that Google is clueless I'd be very interested in seeing it. Otherwise I have to assume the best SE engineers on the planet have covered the basics in a reasonable way.

Just make a .htaccess redirect from http:// to http://www. or visa versa and you'll be fine. This will also get the site indexed correctly faster so your customer will stop complaining sooner.

Telling google webmasters doesn't really do that much. Google still ignores me years after having my "www" preference setup.