Google Sitemaps keep on adding tools that help anyone who runs a website gain a better understanding of how people arrive on your pages. The top search queries table provides fascinating info. I’m hoping that the latest addition will solve an SEO problem for our Storynory site.
Google lists our pages as http://storynory.com without the www. The trouble is that our Google ranking seems to be split between the www address and the non www address. http://storynory.com has a ranking of 5, while http://www.storynory.com has 6, meaning it should come higher up in search results. Unfortunately, its the lower ranking address that’s listed. Now Sitemaps allows you to choose how your site will be listed in its index. Naturally I’ve plumped for www. It might take a while to update.
I reckon the best option, if your ISP will allow it, is to only give out one address with or without the www. This should avoid the problem all together. If you are using WordPress, make sure you have the Sitemaps plugin.
2 Comments
I would be careful of not supporting both www and nothing before your domain name. I’ve often found, and heard of others finding, that one easily concludes that a site doesn’t exist because one typed in some address and got an error back. Whether people try “www” before the domain or not is fairly arbitrary, in my experience.
You may want to simply redirect one to the other.
Thanks Claes-Fredrik - it’s a good suggestion. Unfortunately, our webhost, Bluehost, doesn’t seem to let me do that simply - but I notice that Dreamhost, the other major low-cost web solution, does have a redirect option between www and non http://www.