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Our company ran a site audit on a very basic one-page website and is receiving this warning.

"Normally, a webpage can be accessed with or without adding www.to its domain name. If you haven't specified which version should be prioritized, search engines will crawl both versions, and the link juice will be split between them. Therefore, none of your page versions will get high positions in search results."

I know very little on this topic but want to know what I can do to the HTML so the "Link Juice" is not spread between www. and the domain name and so the message will not appear anymore. Do I need to add a robots.txt file to the root directory?

Site Structure

index.html
/images folder

Possibly relevant head info?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
Benjamin
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1 Answers1

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You can use any or all of following methods.
A. Add canonical link to head section of each page using either www or non-www version (your preferable). Note that crawlers also distinguish http: and https:

<link href="http://www.domain.com/about-us.html" rel="canonical" />

B. Add Link header to HTTP response.

Link: <http://www.domain.com/about-us.html>; rel="canonical"

C. Redirect permanently 301 - moved permanently to your preferable version. If you use IIS you can add this rule from IIS Management Console (URL Rewrite tool).

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" /> is default value and can be removed. robots.txt is the must.

Alex Kudryashev
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  • Alex thanks for this. I ended up using an htaccess file with 301 redirect for a non-www condition. It worked for me. Do you see any issues with this technique compared to what you came up with. – Benjamin Jul 04 '16 at 03:19
  • Canonical meta tag is also highly recommended. Don't forget `sitemap.xml` as well. – Alex Kudryashev Jul 04 '16 at 16:22