Redirecting non-www to www
-
Hi all,
I recently ran my first diagnostic test with SEOmoz and was alarmed to find my company's site has over 8,000 cases of duplicate content, virtually all of which can be attributed to separate domains, www vs. non-www.
So after some research I found that this can be solved easily using .htaccess. However I found a warning on another site that if my site has already been indexed by Google without the www, there could be side effects like a loss in PR.
Can anybody tell me how to find out whether my site falls into this category? I do have access to Google Webmaster tools but I can't find anywhere that tells me how my site's been indexed.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Ryan, you've received some great responses here. Did they answer your question?
-
You're absolutely right, Paul. Thanks. Sometimes I forget that people's domains are more broad than the ones I work with. (I'm permitted to be lazy in this regard, but should not encourage such laziness.)
Onward!
-
Agree w/ what Jesse's saying here, but need a little tidy on his description of how to look at how Google sees the addresses differently. You'll need to Google www.whoopsee.com and then whoopsie.com (note the .com needs to be included both times). Otherwise you're doing a keyword search, not a domain name search.
In fact, the best way to do these is to do a search for site:www.whoopsie.com and then site:whoopsie.com. That will limit the search results to actual URLs from only your own site.
Paul
-
If you want to see the true effect of this "split" you can use Open Site Explorer to check the incoming links of each version of the URL. If there's a major difference, pick the version with the most incoming links as your primary (or canonical) version. Then redirect the secondary version to that URL. Like Jesse, I almost always find the www version is the better one to make primary.
There's no reason not to do this redirecting, and every reason to do it. You may find the rankings fluctuate a little for a day or 2 as the search engines update themselves. But if you don't do this, you essentially have your two sites competing against each other and splitting their value between them. Which means other sites will outrank you even though their "score" is lower, because your score has been split.
Google Webmaster Tools can also tell you this info very effectively, but to get it you're going to have to create a second site inside your GWT account. When you set up your existing GWT site, you used either the www.example.com or non-www version of your website. Whichever address you chose, that is the ONLY index data provided in that GWT site.
As further proof search engines consider them separate sites, the only way to check the other version of your URL is to actually create a whole new site (in the same GWT account) using the other URL version as the setup address.
When on your main dashboard, you'll see a red button in the top right corner for **Add a Site. **Use the URL that's different from the one you used the first time. Then set up and verify as normal. You can use the same verification method you used the first time -most often just using your Google Analytics account to verify is easiest, but if you uploaded a special file or are using the header snippet, those will work again too.
Once you've got the second site set up, you will be able to compare the indexing and incoming links reports to see the differences between the two versions as Google sees them.
Last benefit of setting up both sites - you can now use the GWT tools Configuration -> Settings to tell Google which version of the site is your Preferred Domain. (you can only do this properly if you have both site versions set up) Set the same version of the preferred domain in both versions of the site and you'll give Google a second indicator for which version of your domain is the primary.
Hope that makes sense?
Paul
-
well you can find out how it's been indexed by typing in your domain. For example, if your domain is www.whoopsee.com then google "whoopsee" and see what it returns.
Regardless, this doesn't matter. What you NEED to do is simply do a redirect. Choose one, www or non-www. I prefer www but others prefer other things. It is not going to hurt you if you perform this redirect right this second, no matter what Google has indexed. If you do NOT perform the redirect... THAT is what will hurt your site.
So.. don't delay and don't worry! You will find that things will improve. Keep this in mind - performing a 301 redirect will pass link juice. Meaning if you point domain.com - www.domain.com then all previous links pointing to domain.com will pass juice to the new permanent redirected www.domain.com
Does this make sense?
Long story short - Your site will not be worsened by this redirect. It will be benefited. Because right now, Google sees them as two different sites and they are competing against eachother and link juice is split between them. Join like Voltron and move forward!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirect Chain Issue
I keep running into a redirect chain issue trying to get a non-https/non-www domain to forward directly to the https/www domain on an Apache server. For background, we are forcing https and forcing www, but it appears the non-https/non-www domain is first redirecting to https/non-www and then redirecting again to the desired final https/www version of the domain. (Hope I am making sense here) I am trying to find code to add to my .htaccess file that will perform the following... 301 Redirect
Technical SEO | | FitzSWC
http://example.com directly to https://www.example.com (without 1st redirecting to https://example.com)
http://www.example.com directly to https://www.example.com Any experts in this with any thoughts? Thanks,
Fitz0 -
Are these redirects damaging my rankings
Hi, just been going through my google webmaster tools and i have found a number of soft 404 errors and was shocked to see these redirects going to my home page. | URL | Response Code | Detected |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
| --- | --- | --- |<colgroup><col style="width: 45px;"><col style="width: 80px;"><col><col style="width: 120px;"><col style="width: 90px;"></colgroup>
| | 1 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/475-gastric-band-hypnotherapy-expert-says-government-are-not-doing-enough-to-fight-obesity | | 7/25/13 |
| | 2 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1068-coronation-street-nick-proposes-to-leanne | | 7/28/13 |
| | 3 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1086-coronation-street-fiz-nearly-gets-tyrone-in-trouble-with-kirsty | | 7/28/13 |
| | 4 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1155-coronation-street-kylie-considers-telling-david-about-her-affair | | 7/28/13 |
| | 5 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1157-coronation-street-fiz-is-worried-when-kirsty-pays-her-a-visit | | 7/28/13 |
| | 6 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/750-actress-hilary-duff-is-sued-over-car-accident | | 7/25/13 |
| | 7 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/843-what-your-dogs-bottom-scooting-behaviour%E2%80%99-really-meansI would have thought that the developer who upgraded my site would have either had these blocked or directed them to the correct page. i am now guessing that there are going to be hundreds of these appearing and would like some serious advice.normally with old pages i would have them going to the relevant articles or pages but it seems the developer has redirected hundreds of these to my home page, which i guess is going to confuse google. i would like to know if this will confuse google have all these pages going to my home page.i have tried to find out where the developer in my site has redirected the pages as they are not in my htaccess file, i use joomla.can anyone let me know what i should be doing with these to solve the problemmany thanks |0 -
Trackback Redirects
My wordpress blog/theme displays a Trackback URL link in the comments area of any page that has received a comment, eg http://guitarkitbuilder.com/build-your-own-clone-digital-echo-ping-pong-kit/#comment-2408 My crawl diagnostics report shows these links (basically domain.com/post-name/trackback) as Temporary Redirect warnings 302 with the stock advice "Using HTTP header refreshes, 302, 303 or 307 redirects will cause search engine crawlers to treat the redirect as temporary and not pass any link juice (ranking power). We highly recommend that you replace temporary redirects with 301 redirects." Before I take more action on this I want to make sure this is a real problem. My initial effort to fix it was to turn off trackbacks in the wordpress settings-discussion area and also on specific posts, but the Trackback URL link still shows for any post with a comment. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | jeff_amm0 -
Redirect to new domain
We are moving our website from http://mysyncpad.com to http://syncpadapp.com The old site ranks pretty well for some specific keywords, will a 301 allow the new site to rank as well or will it be penalized by good for the transfer?
Technical SEO | | fifthlayer0 -
Domain redirection and seo implications
We have an existing site that is a subdomain but we recently acquired an exact match domain. Will building links to the exact match domain and having the domain point at our existing subdomain work or should we convert the entire site and redirect our existing subdomain to the new domain? What I'm trying to figure out is how to maximize the benefit here and how the existing mass of links pointing to our existing subdomain (shop.domain.com) can be used. New domain: keywordshop.com Existing URL: shop.domain.com
Technical SEO | | CHarkins0 -
Setting preferred domain as www or none www
Way back before panda I used to rank for certain keywords pretty well. Of course like many others after panda I lost some of those rankings. I have been getting better since then so its not that bad. I was poking around in Google Webmaster Tools and I noticed something which I need some clarification in. History my site freescrabbledictionary.com used to be indexed as a none www. Then some time ago I can't remember when I set it to www. Tonight I was looking through my webmaster tools and I noticed something that did not make sense to me. In my content keywords section for the none www my list is as follows Content Keywords <form action="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/keywords-list?hl=en&siteUrl=http://freescrabbledictionary.com/" method="GET"> Keyword Significance 1. scrabble 2. words (2 variants) 3. dictionary 4. cheat 5. finder 6. friends 7. maker (2 variants) 8. noun 9. letter (2 variants) 10. hasbro 11. mattel 12. spear 13. found (2 variants) 14. sowpods 15. freescrabbledictionary 16. builder 17. affiliated 18. search 19. solver 20. lists </form> Then I looked at my www lists and its Content Keywords <form action="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/keywords-list?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/" method="GET"> Keyword Significance 1. words (3 variants) 2. scrabble (2 variants) 3. letter (4 variants) 4. points 5. cheat (3 variants) 6. friends (2 variants) 7. finder (2 variants) 8. anagram (2 variants) 9. dictionary 10. tool (2 variants) 11. hasbro 12. mattel 13. spear 14. game (4 variants) 15. mobile 16. affiliated (3 variants) 17. berkshire 18. canada 19. calculations (5 variants) 20. coming (4 variants) </form> My none www version has the order (especially the first 5 keywords) that I want, my www version is no were near it. If I change back to the none www version could I possible see an change in rank? or can it effect it if I change it? I am starting to think I shot myself in the foot when I switched...
Technical SEO | | cbielich0 -
When is it safe to remove 301 redirects?
I have created over 500 301 redirects in my .htaccess file, some of them are more than 2 years old now. Should I delete them? I don't like seeing the "notices" number in crawl diagnostics so high 😞
Technical SEO | | danielshaw0 -
.htaccess and www - non www
Recently I have taken over a website and I made a pretty colossal mistake. The site was properly constructed via .htaccess to a www domain. Typically I roll without it and I made a bad assumption that the .htaccess was not previously set correctly because there were hundreds of fundamental mistakes. After a couple of days I noticed the mistake but some of our new (non www) have picked up some solid links etc. So now I feel that I am in a nightmare of creating redirects etc. So should I switch back to WWW or not? Does it matter at this point?
Technical SEO | | mikeusry0