Question About Anchor Links and Competitive Backlink searches

[jonathan9926]

For the first question, I have .htaccess to 301 redirect my myhomepage.com to www.myhomepage.com. Let's say I have two links pointing to my site.

One is pointing to myhomepage.com which is without the www
and the other is pointing to my www.myhomepage.com

Will my www.myhomepage.com get credit for both links?

I notice some of my competition have backlinks pointing to their www.homepage.com and some pointing to homepage.com only.

 

[Linda Buquet]

For the first question, I have .htaccess to 301 redirect my myhomepage.com to Welcome to myhomepage.com. Let's say I have two links pointing to my site.

You did that part right and that's as it should be.

I'm not sure about the answer to the linking question, but to be on the safe side, from now on just be sure you have your links go to Welcome to myhomepage.com.

 

[jonathan9926]

Cool thanks. I was thinking of using the address without the www so that I can hide some of my backlinks but I guess I should just focus on getting my site to the top 10 sites first.

 

[djbaxter]

Matt Cutts just commented on 301 redirects recently and shocked many people by stating that the redirect does NOT pass the full PageRank. What else is may not pass isn't clear.

But your issue is different - canonicalization. There are various ways to do this, including your .htacess method, but the best advice is to establish at Google Webmaster Central and follow the directions to verify that you own your site. Then you can specify how you want Google to treat the canoicalization issue, e.g., funnel everything to www.yoursite.com or everything to yoursite.com.

 

[jonathan9926]

I already did the google webmaster thing a long time ago. I was just thinking about hiding some of my backlinks by spreading them on two urls.

I notice that when I do competitive research, non-www and www adresses pointing to the same homepage gives different results.

 

[djbaxter]

I already did the google webmaster thing a long time ago. I was just thinking about hiding some of my backlinks by spreading them on two urls.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hiding some of my backlinks", or even why you would want to do that, but if you've already selected which version you prefer in Google Webmaster I don't think it's going to work.

I notice that when I do competitive research, non-www and www adresses pointing to the same homepage gives different results.

If by "competitive research" you mean looking at how your competitors rank and what backlinks they have:

1. If they have not used one of the available techniques for specifying canonicalization issues, yes, you will see different results for domain.com vs. www.domain.com. That's why canonicalization is an issue at all.

2. If you or your competitors use subdomains, e.g., subdomain.comain.com (like this forum), then you will always see a difference between domain.com (which includes subdomains) and www.domain.com (which does not include subdomains).

3. Note that the link: query is inaccurate, especially with Google.

 

[jonathan9926]

I use sites and programs to do competitive research. One of the things I look at are the backlinks of my top competitors. woorank says they are using canonicalization but the sites and programs I use give different backlinks for their non-www and www main page.

 

[djbaxter]

What is "woorank"?

 

[Linda Buquet]

WooRank | Website analysis tool

About:

WooRank is the fruit of much hard work by online marketing consultants, clockwork-precision developers and creative designers. Together they've built a simple yet powerful website analysis tool meant to leverage search engines.

Now web professionals have an objective yardstick to know what Google looks for when crawling their websites: WooRank