I was wondering if the Preferred Domain section under the Diagnostic tab on the My Account page might be causing my problem with getting my gsitecrawler sitemap to be recognized by Google without errors. I have a Path Not Matched kind of error. The explanation said something about using the www or not. I forget the exact explanation but maybe some of you know what I'm talking about. I can't remember if I initially added my site this way or not, but Google has me indexed as http://picturesarepriceless.com in My Account. I'm afraid to "delete" the site and add a new one as http://www.picturesarepriceless.com. And maybe this is not even the issue, but I'm not sure what to do at this point. All I know for sure is that Google says my sitemap has errors because my sitemap has URLs using the w's. I've deleted my sitemap entirely from My Account. So does anyone know what I should do next? Thanks for any help!
dianah wrote: > I was wondering if the Preferred Domain section under the Diagnostic > tab on the My Account page might be causing my problem with getting my > gsitecrawler sitemap to be recognized by Google without errors. I have > a Path Not Matched kind of error. The explanation said something about > using the www or not. I forget the exact explanation but maybe some of > you know what I'm talking about. I can't remember if I initially added > my site this way or not, but Google has me indexed as > http://picturesarepriceless.com in My Account. I'm afraid to "delete" > the site and add a new one as http://www.picturesarepriceless.com. And > maybe this is not even the issue, but I'm not sure what to do at this > point. All I know for sure is that Google says my sitemap has errors > because my sitemap has URLs using the w's. I've deleted my sitemap > entirely from My Account. So does anyone know what I should do next? > Thanks for any help!
> Diana
Diana, I believe the best solution would be to use your .htaccess and force all of your links to the non www. When you crawl to generate your sitemap through gsitecrawler, this will guarantee that the non www will be used. I had the same thing happen to me, so I know what you are going through.
JCF1996 wrote: > Diana, I believe the best solution would be to use your .htaccess and > force all of your links to the non www. When you crawl to generate > your sitemap through gsitecrawler, this will guarantee that the non www > will be used. I had the same thing happen to me, so I know what you > are going through.
I sure hate to show my ignorance, but what is .htaccess? Also, if this is important to know, my host is godaddy.com. I'm guessing that when I initially published my site to godaddy (using Microsoft FrontPage) I used the www. Or, maybe they defaulted me to www. Can't remember. Would I need to change anything through godaddy.com?
.htaccess is a file that is used if the site is hosted on an APACHE server, if you are using a microsoft IIS server it will not be available. If you are on an IIS server the following code will work for your .asp pages.
dianah wrote: > I sure hate to show my ignorance, but what is .htaccess? Also, if this > is important to know, my host is godaddy.com. I'm guessing that when I > initially published my site to godaddy (using Microsoft FrontPage) I > used the www. Or, maybe they defaulted me to www. Can't remember. > Would I need to change anything through godaddy.com?
> Diana
Diana, the .htaccess might be a bit beyond you, if you are not comfortable with coding outside of the visual environment of FrontPage (personally, I recommend that you use Dreamweaver instead of FrontPage). However, if you have regular FTP access to your site, the file would go in the same directory as your main index.html file. You can make a .htaccess file through several methods or have your web-host make one for you (they may or may not do this for you). Alternatively, I would be happy to create one for you and send it to you to upload to your site.
JCF1996 wrote: > Diana, the .htaccess might be a bit beyond you, if you are not > comfortable with coding outside of the visual environment of FrontPage > (personally, I recommend that you use Dreamweaver instead of > FrontPage). However, if you have regular FTP access to your site, the > file would go in the same directory as your main index.html file. You > can make a .htaccess file through several methods or have your web-host > make one for you (they may or may not do this for you). Alternatively, > I would be happy to create one for you and send it to you to upload to > your site.
Thanks so much for your reply and offer to help. Sorry for the slow response back to you. I had to take a break from all this stuff. I think it was getting to me, ya know? Guess what? I got a resonse from a Google person, and she told me to add the site with the www, then verify, submit the sitemap, and then delete the site with no w's. It worked - the sitemap status is "OK". What a relief.
JLH wrote: > .htaccess is a file that is used if the site is hosted on an APACHE > server, if you are using a microsoft IIS server it will not be > available. If you are on an IIS server the following code will work > for your .asp pages.
As it turned out, I didn't have to use a .htaccess file. After I added my site with the w's and deleted the one without, it seems all ok. Sounds too easy, huh? I'm so appreciate of you responding to my question. I'll be so glad when all this technical stuff is behind me.
Red Cardinal wrote: > I think you should really try to implement the redirect via .htaccess.
> Its not that hard - about 3 short lines which are readily available > online.
> Your site is still available via both www and non-www.
What should the lines be? I have the domain hosted through godaddy.com. I looked back through my info, and they do have the name set up without the www. Man, I thought I had this battle conquered. Oh, well. I really appreciate you letting me know this. Thanks so much.
> If your .htaccess file is empty then stick this into a plain text file, > rename it .htaccess and upload to the root folder (select overwrite).
> If your .htaccess file has lines in it then append this to it (remove > the first line if it's there all ready and stick the other 2 below it).
I'm reading all I can right now on the htaccess file. I want to understand it and what it does. You mentioned that if my "file is empty" ... Well, I don't even have one currently, so I guess I follow the instructions as if it's empty? Thanks so much for your help, and also thanks to JLH and JCF1996. I'll let ya'll know how this turns out.
Dianah, I believe it is a mistake to submit both the www and non-www to the search engines. What actually ends up happening is that the search engines will crawl your site based on both. Sounds great right? You'll have double the results in Google, right? Must be win-win, right? The answer is, it's not great, you will have double results and it is not win-win because Google will say you have duplicate content and your ratings will drop.
I can't believe Google would give you such a brief "solution" without telling you more to do. Do they want to hurt you?
You need to put the .htaccess in place to eliminate the duplicate results in the search engines. It will take a bit of time to resolve, but it will. Also, if you ever start another site, I recommend getting the .htaccess with the re-write rules in place right away to prevent this problem from happening again.
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