I am a newbie with very little knowledge and have made this website http://www.***.com. It is a Chat Site.

I was just willing to analyze my site and went to a website http://nibbler.silktide.com/

I analyzed my site and there was one thing which I want to be fixed and can't find any easy to understand information on internet and could not find any relevant info at the hosting provider's site.

This is the link of my site analysis:-

http://nibbler.silktide.com/reports/***.com


What I want to be corrected is Server Behaviour.


What they have mentioned in their report goes like this. I am doing a copy paste of their report.

"Server behaviour

Help

Duplicate content found at site with and without the www

This website does not return a 404 error HTTP status code for missing pages. This is bad because search engines like Google might mistake this for a real page of content.
Ensure your web server returns a 404 HTTP status code for error pages.
This website was not served using GZIP encoding. GZIP compression is widely supported and reduces the load time of a web page.
Enable GZIP compression on your web server or in your application. Close detail
Pages without GZIP
Page
***.com/
***.com/rules.html
***.com/contact.html
1
This website returns page content with or without a trailing slash on the URLs. Search engines might see these as separate pages with duplicate content which they could penalise for.
Use a 301 redirect or a canonical meta tag to force search engines to see the correct version. Close detail
Duplicate pages
Tested page

Alternate
***.com/rules.html

***.com/rules.html/
***.com/contact.html

***.com/contact.html/
1
There is duplicate content on http://www.***.com and http://***.com. This is bad, as technically they are classed as two different websites. Search engines may lower a website's rank if they find the same content on two different URLs.
Choose one domain that you would like to use and then set a permanent (HTTP 301) redirect to forward users who visit the other."





Somebody please tell me how can this issue be fixed as according to them this might lower down my search engine ranking (though currently I don't have any

Or else please provide links to the information which is easy to understand for a newbie.

Thanks in advance.

This is about canonicalization & SEO or "www or no www".
Search for the latter and you'll find some interesting links:
- http://www.sitepoint.com/domain-www-or-no-www/
- http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/a...mp;answer=44231

thnx for the reply. jst clicked on the links and lets see how it goes

well, i tired a lot. searched a lot on internet to fix it but could not do it. Now I have requested help my my hosting provider's support finally. Lets see what they say

I have just created a signature . hope it's not against the forums rules. I have read in a few places that if you post a signature in forums that you use which upon clicking redirects the user to your website would help increase traffic.


If what I have done is against the rules of this forum please let me know or forum moderators/admins please delete my signature. But please don't ban me from this forum.


I loved this site

Thanks

It's normal to have things set up as your host has. Both alternatives need to be covered since people will type www out of habit, even if it isn't needed anymore. You can use a .htaccess file (if you are on Apache) to rewrite one of the ULRs, preferably the www one, so all requests go to the other URL and only this one is indexed by search engines.

You can use this.



Another method is described here.
http://www.webword.com/moving/wwwremoval.html

But take care messing with your .htaccess file if you aren't used to it. One typo and your site stops to work. Back the file up before you start so you can upload the old copy and let it overwrite the new one in case you mess up.

I tried to review my site . This is the report link:-

http://nibbler.silktide.com/reports/***.com


One thing which I want to fix is regarding this point as mentioned in the report

"There is duplicate content on http://www.***.com and http://***.com. This is bad, as technically they are classed as two different websites. Search engines may lower a website's rank if they find the same content on two different URLs.

Choose one domain that you would like to use and then set a permanent (HTTP 301) redirect to forward users who visit the other."



I tried searching on google regarding the same and I found info about editing the .htaccess file and edited it on a format like this:-


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

Nothing has happened and both www and non -www version are running.


I want the non-www version and redirect to non-www from www if someone enters the www version.



How can this be done ??

Please help.

Note- I dont understand any of this htaccess thing , so please tell me what should I write in that file and I will copy paste the same.

Thanks

i have tried everything . i just put some dumy data in htaccess file and site still working. means htacess is not functional. lol.

I have been able to fix it now but changed my mind and now redirecting all requests to www version.

I have been able to fix it now but changed my mind and now redirecting all requests to www version.

Thank god. one more issue fixed.. Many more to fix. miles to go before i sleep..

Why do you want to keep the www?

Threads merged.

Well some how I had been able to do the permanent redirect thing after lot of hard work. !!

Well I gave a thought and finally decided to keep www as the permanent version. Don't know the reason really but its just like that

test post