Canonical Homepage and Windows Server

[Ellio]

I have just noticed that Google have a separately cached pages for http: //oursite.co.uk and http: //www. oursite.co.uk and I believe this to be triggering "duplicate content" filters and causing the current problems we are having with the homepage "Page Rank" and "SERPs" in Google. (PR6 to PR0 all other 400 pages OK)

As we are now on a Windows server we cannot use a .htaccess file to set up a 301 redirect so I need your help if you have any ideas as to how to tell Googlebot that we only want the http: //www.oursite.co.uk in the index. I know there are some scripts available but it will be hard to check if they are working as the non www already default auto-redirects to the www page!

Can anybody with genuine experience or knowledge in this are please help? Other comments may just confuse the issue.

[jaldridge]

This is very easy to do on a windows server.

Open IIS and set up a new website for oursite.co.uk (set the host header to this). You should already have one set up for host header www.oursite.co.uk.

Once you've set up a website for oursite.co.uk, right click the website and select "properties".

Then select the "Home directory" tab. Here you have to select the "Redirect to a url" option, type in "www.oursite.co.uk" in the "redirect to" box and then select the checkbox "A permanent redirect to this url".

And that's it! Very easy.

You can also set this up in the global.asax file if you are using asp.net (I can give you the code if you need it) but I would try it in IIS first.

Let me know if you have any problems with it.

[Ellio]

This is very easy to do on a windows server.

Open IIS and set up a new website for oursite.co.uk (set the host header to this). You should already have one set up for host header www.oursite.co.uk.

Once you've set up a website for oursite.co.uk, right click the website and select "properties".

Then select the "Home directory" tab. Here you have to select the "Redirect to a url" option, type in "www.oursite.co.uk" in the "redirect to" box and then select the checkbox "A permanent redirect to this url".

And that's it! Very easy.

Many thanks for that its the exact solution I came accross a little earlier and implemented but with no immediate effect!

The reason being our domain host has not pointed the A record to our IP address, only the "www" A record, the effect being the non wwww is currently being sent to their default IP and then redirected to the www address.

I have asked them to change the DNS A record to point at our IP (Server) address and once this is done your solution should work very well.

I have also considered using IIS to set up a seperate site folder and host a single unique page on the oursite.co.uk domain with a manual text link to the correct www site. This way there is absolutely no chance of Google having canonical problems and confusing the two domains.

Two methods both of which should do the job.

Once again many thanks