I wouldn't believe it if it didn't happen to my sites - a few sites. In the last two months, I noticed Google didn't crawl my sites daily like before, the pages got de-indexed quickly, the rankings also dropped to nowhere. I thought it was caused by the changes of Google's ranking algorithm and didn't look into it. Today, I found an index page wasn't cached by Google, I feel something is really wrong here.
After some checking, I found it was caused by the links pointing to the non-www verson. This topic has been discussed a lot on the webmaster forums, but I didn't get it without examples. I didn't believe Google had such a silly problem either.
See an Example
It can be accessed with http://www.xwz.com/ or http://xwz.com/. I always promote my sites with www version. But if someone links to this blog with http://seoblog.us/, Google treats xwz.com and www.xwz.com as two different sites and will dump out www.xwz.com because of duplicated content. Very hard to believe? It's that that simple, that silly.
It can be accessed with http://www.xwz.com/ or http://xwz.com/. I always promote my sites with www version. But if someone links to this blog with http://seoblog.us/, Google treats xwz.com and www.xwz.com as two different sites and will dump out www.xwz.com because of duplicated content. Very hard to believe? It's that that simple, that silly.
As now, I have at least 5 sites ( around one year old) which lost the most pages including their index pages. Since the majority links point to www version, the non-www version has very poor ranking. I can't find the links pointing to non-www version, I guess they are only a few, I can't understand why Google dumps out the www version which has hundreds of links. This is the worst thing happened to my websites since I was a webmaster, I have to say it is the silliest thing about the search engines I have ever heard.
You can read more details about this problem here, also many discussions.
This problem can be fixed by redirecting one url to the other one. I used .htaccess, see below example
Solution for Canonical Issues
1. Create a text file named ".htaccess" with the following content, place it under the root directory.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xwz.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.xwz.com/$1 [R=301,L]
If you have .htaccess under sub-directories, it should be modified accordingly.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xwz.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.xwz.com/forums/$1 [R=301,L]
Sub-domains are like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.forums.xwz.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://forums.xwz.com/$1 [R=301,L]
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