Does redirect(+same pages differtent urls) hurt site ranking?

On my site http://www.example.com the same pages are displayed for differnt URLs could this be hurting my site rank?

e.g.

http://www.example.com
http://example.com
http://www.example.com/site/
http://example.com/site/

The four URLs above all go to the same location

I have a redirect set up on example.com to redirect to example.com/site using php depending on the client it will be example.com/site or example.com/other.

I also have example.com/site set to change the url to www.example.com/site using php again.

I hope that makes sense so far, my question is, is that hurting my site ranking? (looking at my google results it does appear to be the case) So how can I make my site more friendly to search engines?

Hi G00SE,

Short answer is YES!!!!! This will definately hurt your rankings.

The best way to get around this is to get rid of the directory altogether and re-direct everything to just ONE URL.

The wya tha tyou've got it there, Google sees at least two, and possibly up to four different versions of the same site so you'll get hit big time with a duplicat content filter, as you've seen. Get it all going back to one single URL and you'll be right in time.

Thanks for replying,

I thought as much, how would I go about getting google to only see one version of the site? because I still need the site to be in a directory.

There's not to many options for setting up something like that.

My first suggestion would be to scan for User-Agent types and when GoogleBot surfs by, set up a 301 re-direction to the main site. Also, set your robots.txt file to dissallow access for GoogleBot to any directories that will be mirrors of the main site.

Do that, and you shouldn't have to many problems with any duplicate content penalties. It's not quite as easy as it sounds, so it'll depend on exactly how bad the problem is as to how much work you'll have to do get it working.

Thanks for replying again, I hope it is possible to write a 301 direct using php because this would solve the problem.

I was just having another think about this,

at the moment I'm doing,

if (user agent accepts something)
redirect here
else
redirect somewhere else

On which one of the two cases should I put the 301 redirect or should I put it on both?

With the way that you've shown there, you should use a 301 from both. I am going to assume that one redirection is for Search Engines and the other is for other Search Engines, or real visitors. If that's the case, then it'll be fine. Just keep it all consistent and you'll have no problems.

Thank Catacaustic I've set up the 301, trying it just in the one place for now, see how it goes.

Thanks

One quick post -- may not be appropriate:

Always link your pages with OR without the WWW subdomain within your website. Most websites have their www. ranked higher than the bare domain name.

Eddy, Odd Circle