Rogue Url - Search Engine Impact

[A Party Shop]

My site is appearing with the rogue url www.www.apartyshop (http://www.www.apartyshop/) .co.uk It will show no matter how many www.www.www.www (http://www.www.www.www/). appear before the .apartyshop.co.uk

I've always had the site accessible via www.apartyshop.co.uk (http://www.apartyshop.co.uk/) and apartyshop.co.uk

Can anyone see any reason for this having an adverse effect with Search Engines?

Thanks in advance.

[neild]

Definetly not right having more than one www's before the domain name. I have never seen this before but after a quick search through Google I have come across the same problem which all leads to the web host.

Contact them and explain the situation, it may turn out that the DNS part has a wildcard '*' in front of the domain name e.g. - *.mydomainname.com

As for search engines, don't worry they would have picked it up but when the changes are done the serch engines will rectify the problem in due course.

[A Party Shop]

Sorry, should have said.

I've found out why it's happening here; http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=140289

and now just wanted to explore the impact on Search Engines.

[Ben_Chemistry]

Hi Party Shop,

You have a problem around url canonicalization, I have not seen multiple www's before before but this article should help you answer this question on apartyshop.co.uk vs the www version and how to address the issue. Sorry, I'm too new here to post live links :rolleyes:

Look up "cutts canonical urls" in Google and check the top result from Matt Cutts blog.

[KM-Tiger]

I don't think there is anything wrong with wildcard DNS, it makes life easy if you want to add subdomains, eg blog.yourdomain.com.

But the webserver shouldn't answer for non-existent domains.

[neild]

Sorry, should have said.

I've found out why it's happening here; http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=140289

and now just wanted to explore the impact on Search Engines.

Lol, not a problem.

[A Party Shop]

Following on from this, as the * wildcard has now been removed, I was looking within Google Webmaster Tools and see I have the following set-up;

Preferred domain

Ticked - Don't set a preferred domain
Unticked - Display URLs as www.apartyshop.co.uk (http://www.apartyshop.co.uk)
Unticked - Display URLs as apartyshop.co.uk

Does this look correct?

Help, as always, is much appreciated.

[neild]

Yea thats fine, just don't place any wildcards there :)