Google and Yahoo both offer tools for webmasters to ascertain the current status of their site in the engines. In Google, if you want to know the number of pages indexed you run a “site:” command, and if you want to know the number of incoming links you run a “link:” command. In Yahoo, running the “site:” command provides you with both numbers. Seems simple enough, right? So why is there a difference when you type “site:yoursite.com” and “site:www.yoursite.com”? It’s because the engines see them both as different domains. They’re both technically right, so what can you do about it?
The answer is canonicalization. Normalizing your domains. You can do this by using settings on your server to have your site return the www version when the non-www version is requested (or vice versa). Google also gives you the ability to specify the correct form through their Google Webmaster Tools interface, and whichever form they crawl will be converted to the form you specify.

Once you normalize your data into the canonical form, you’ll make your reporting tasks a heck of a lot easier, which will enable you to more easily track the performance of your site. For more information on canonicalization check out a post from Google’s Matt Cutts.

Filed under: SEO on Monday, July 16th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine | 1 Comment
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