Wondering why in the search engines index, your Joomla! links appear both with and without "www" ?
Until you set the preferred domain to tell search engines how to display URLs in their index, the website will have issues with duplicate content.
SEO disadvantages:
The pagerank will be divided to both versions of the website.
Not to mention that spiders will have a harder time to discover the fresh content because they will be forced to index both versions of your Joomla! website. (spiders have limited bandwidth when crawling a website).
This duplicate content issue can be eliminated easily:
1. choose from Google Webmasters Tools the preferred domain
2. set a 301 redirect
Why not use just the redirect? or Why not use just the preferred domain method?
Choosing the preferred domain helps Google understand what you prefer to be indexed and how the links will be displayed in its index: with "www" in front of the domain or without. After choosing the preferred domain, set a permanent redirect for the Joomla! URLs to send the traffic from the other version of the domain to the preferred one.
The 301 redirect can be set using a .htaccess file with redirect rules, but this method is more complicated especially for beginners.
There is also, the easy solution: you can set a 301 redirect by using RSSeo! - our Joomla! Seo suite, to specify the preferred domain in the Joomla! backend.
Watch this video to understand how to do it: Ep.15 - Enable canonicalization for your Joomla! website with RSSeo!
I plan on implementing on all my clients sites. Before I could do this I purchased for my site. RSSeo is very straight forward and easy to understand. I also own Web Ceo and now I can see how much of a difference it is making. I have already increased my ranks in two days. Great Extension. James
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