WWW vs non-WWW - understanding the physical file and directory background

[murphypj]

Apologies. If course it is, don't know what I was thinking of there. Too many late nights - sorry Weegillis! You wold think, though, that Google, reading the sitemap, would index the URLs as presented, and manage to reconcile this ridiculous anomoly only G seems to have.
PJ

[deepsand]

God, Google is slow.

On WMT, for desired canonical form, Sitemaps page just now shows "Processed" as of today. What the hell did they do with all the increased computing power that Caffeine brought?

[jhannawin]

While the same can be accomplished with a 301 redirect, such is actually a kludge, as the DNS already automatically executes that function. Returning a 301 Header code to Google is actually a lie, for the purpose of bringing its attention to the fact that both canonical forms do in fact reference the same entity.

Yes, this one has bugged me for some time. Our system handles this by allowing users to set up the relevant host 301s and putting implicit/explicit 301s in automatically. However, all we are doing is reducing Google's workload with an inelegant kludge when the elegant solution has existed for years. DNS is, in my opinion, one of the most elegant solutions to a truly mind boggling problem that man has ever come up with.

And as for 'belt and braces' ... always works for me, particularly for something proprietary like the canonical code.

[murphypj]

@Deepsand - it seems that, since GWT removed the 'resubmit' option from its 'sitemaps' page, the sitemap shows as 'pending' every time it re-crawls after you've made a change. Yesterday it was showing x pages found, 1 page indexed ( a low-relevance one ), so I changed the priority down on this page, and made a few other changes. Today it is showing as 'Pending' again, with today as the 'Processed' date.


Can I ask how your own test is going? Have you been able to get multiple pages, for the right version, indexed yet?


PJ

[deepsand]

Hm-mm; I'm still seing the "Resubmit" button on the Sitemap page for both canonical forms.

As for progress, all I see is that the "Processed" date advances by one day with each new day.

[murphypj]

That's strange. When I go to the Sitemaps page, I only see 'Delete Selected' and 'Clear'. I used to always use the 'Resubmit' any time I made changes to any of my sites, but it's not showing for me for the past few weeks. Under 'Indexed' the current site is still showing 'Pending', which used to happen for a short while when I was able to click on 'resubmit'. 'Processed' is showing as Feb 10, which is yesterday here, but presumably 'today' in Googletime.
PJ

[deepsand]

"Resubmit" may be deactivated while status is "Pending."

I.e., "We got it, we're working on it, and we're not going to accept another until we've finished working on this one."

I'm not even up to "Pending" yet. No idea why the "Processed" date keeps advancing day by day.

I uploaded & "Fetched as Google" under the canonical form that I specified in the canonical tag. Going to re-do under the other one and see what happens.

[murphypj]

If that's the case, it's a new 'feature', 'cos I know when working with sites with higher numbers of pages I have often used 'Resubmit' while the previous submission of the sitemap was still pending. Strange that it is showing for you, but not for me?

As I said earlier, this is my first project in a while, but certainly the 'Processed' date used to relate to a date shortly after the sitemap submission, and didn't keep changing, as it does now.

As far as the www v non-www situation from my original post is concerned, the site is currently in good Page 1 positions for all of the agreed targetted phrases, but still listing without the www. When I check GWT for 'Link to your site', the www stilll shows 'No Data Available', while the non-www shows only 13 domains, but 4 of these are among the 150 or so I have created, all with links to the www version.

Not sure if this means that G now accepts that links to www are also links to non-www. If I could be happy that this were the case, I would be home and dry. I really don't care which version G displays in SERPs. so long as my link-building campaign is positively affecting the website's position on the search pages.

PJ

[deepsand]

As far as the www v non-www situation from my original post is concerned, the site is currently in good Page 1 positions for all of the agreed targetted phrases, but still listing without the www. When I check GWT for 'Link to your site', the www stilll shows 'No Data Available', while the non-www shows only 13 domains, but 4 of these are among the 150 or so I have created, all with links to the www version.

Not sure if this means that G now accepts that links to www are also links to non-www.

Per Google's documentation, all data accumulated under both forms is to be combined, so that nothing is lost.

[weegillis]

As an aside, we need also remember that once a SE is aware of the sitemap.xml file, they request it with regularity. There is no need to resubmit unless the site has gone through a major overhaul, or is just getting back on track, for whatever reason. Just keep it up with changes made.