“is “confused” because half my links go to integritycasinoguide.com and half go to http://www.integritycasinoguide.com ?”
Google has as a goal recently eliminating duplicate content. In general this is clearly a good goal. No one wants ten duplicate sites appearing first in the serps as site-1.com, site-2.com, etc.
You are deliberately choosing to confuse Google. At times they are better sorting out sloppy webmastering, but now, with the emphasis on detecting duplicates, they are much less forgiving. integritycasinoguide.com and http://www.integritycasinoguide.com are different pages, period. They could have different content on them if you wanted to. The fact that they don’t doesn’t change the fact that they could have different content. If a webmaster cares about what asearch engine thinks, you should make it easy for the engine, not hard, and certainly not hard over something trivial.
“If that’s true, why would Google be so incompetent in this area?”
They are not incompetent in this case. They are too competent. They detected the duplicate content. What they have to do then is determine the canonical page, and rank that.
“How can they penalize us for something beyond our control?”
It’s not beyond your control. Use a 301 redirect to redirect site.com to http://www.site.com; make internal links absolute not relative; etc.
“And, if we are penalized, why the “zero”s with no grey bar?”
I don’t know whether you are penalized or not. That doesn’t relate to what I wrote. The duplicate content is normally filtered, not penalized. One result shows, the others don’t.
See here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22almost+2,000+online+casinos%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&safe=off&filter=0
Your top result was cached on the 26th, the bottom one on the 22nd.
Your bigger problem may be http://www.integrity-casino-guide.com hanging on as a supplemental result. That’s obviously a much more troubling duplicate than the difference between www and non-www. Perhaps when that Supplemental result disappears you won’t have problems. (I’ve only look a little at your sites so I’m just speculating.)
Simoneaton,
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=www.bet-the-nfl.com
You look to have a similar issue(s). Get rid of your internal links to http://www.bet-the-nfl.com/index.html, make all the links to http://www.bet-the-nfl.com/
But then the nature of your sites is to have a lot of duplicate content in any case, like your lines page comes from http://www.vipsports.com/lines.asp?action=lines&league=NFL&framesize=470
Maybe others won’t agree, but Google should not rank this page. It should index the VIP sports one. The world doesn’t need to have thousands of these duplicate pages in the index.
On the other hand, you have a lot of similar sites. Without looking at them, perhaps you have some interlinking, or duplicate content, or bad neighborhood linking issue.
Fergie, yes you should fix those asap. The duplicate problems are one thing, but on a more basic level linking to site.com sometimes and http://www.site.com other times splits up your pagerank in a way that just throws part of it away.