Hi, I am little bit confused in 301 redirect
-
Hi, I am little bit confused I have set my preferred domain to www but anyone can access my site via both www and non www domains, do I need to 301 redirect all non www to www or not , If yes then I want to know Why and If no then also I want to Why.
-
Hi Amarjit,
If you set up the preferred domain in Google Webmaster, in reality that should be fine for most SEO purposes.
That said, it's still best practices to redirect visitors to one version or another. It's doubtful you'll see much SEO benefit from it, but it might make things easier from a consistancy point of view, and it's long been a regular practice of most SEOs.
You can read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Best of luck!
-
Hi Mike,
Actually, I could be wrong, but I don't believe this is required. Google will ask during setup if you want to track subdomains, (and technically www is a subdomain) but I believe this is mostly for the benefit of how the data is displayed in the reports.
For www or non-www, Google will 'count' both as long as the tracking code is on the page. Depending on your analytics setup, you may or may not be able to determine if the visitor landed on a www page or not, but the page visit will register.
Does that make sense? I'm being very broad here, apologies for that.
-
Yes I got, Thanks
-
You would need to setup Google Analytics with a www version and a non-www version to view traffic information. Same goes for managing your site, you need to setup both version in Google Webmaster Tools if you want to see data for both.
Google views the non-www version and the www version as two separate sites, that is why you need to set it up twice if that is the route you choose to take.
Does that answer your question?
Mike
-
Hi, Thanks to all of you. Actually I want to ask if I will not redirect than if someone is coming to my non www version that visit will be counted by google analytics ? or not
-
When you say "set my preferred domain to www" do you mean via webmaster tools? if so google does not have control over your site, so of course there will be no forced redirect.
www.yourdomain.com is different from yourdomain.com, so you can pr can be split (if your backlinks are a mix of both).
should you do a force redirect for www, via htaccess? yes, why? its good practice and easy to do. also it will fix it for bing and other search engines
-
Without additional information, I can only make a guess on your first comment, "I have set my preferred domain to www..." - are you talking about doing this is Google Webmaster Tools? If so, that is simply telling Google that you would prefer they index your www version versus your non-www version.
Depending on your CMS, you should be able to write some code to automatically redirect all non-www calls to your site to their www counterparts. If you are using IIS, you'd edit your web.config file. If you are using Apache, you'd edit your .htaccess file.
Does that make sense?
Mike
-
If you have set your preferred domain then its fine. It means you have already told Google about your preference.
If your website is old and you have made several backlinks on you non-preferred domain then link juice will not be transfer. It will be a better practice if you will do it also through 301 redirection.
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
-
Should existing canonical tags be removed where a 301 redirect is the preferred option?
Hi, I'm working on a site that is currently using canonical tags to deal with www and non-www variations. My recommendation is to setup 301 redirects to deal with this issue instead. However, is it ok to leave the existing canonical tags in place alongside the new 301 redirects or should they be removed? My thoughts are that this is not a canonical issue and therefore they should be removed? If 301 redirects are not possible it would be better have them that nothing at all but I don't think we need both, right? Any feedback much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | MVIreland0 -
301 Redirects
Hello, All. Hopefully this will be an easy question for some of you. I have a (WordPress) site with the format of: http://www.site.com/folder-old/page-old/ I have since re-named both the parent and sub-folders to (example): http://www.site.com/folder-new/page-new/ Everything is working well EXCEPT I am also trying to redirect visitors from the old URL/structure to the new. I have a 301 redirect setup as the following: Redirect 301 /folder-old/page-old/ http://www.site.com/folder-new/page-new/ -- But it doesn't seem to be working. Not sure if this is something finicky with WordPress or if the redirect is incorrect. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Canonicals & 301 Redirects to new Domain
We will be changing our domain name soon and I want to make sure I'm not painting myself into a corner. Of course, I want to transfer as much link equity as possible. Question #1: Do I need to define a canonical from the old domain to the new domain? Question #2: Do I also need to put 301s in place on the pages with link equity, or is there a way to apply 301s across the entire site on all pages? Any input would be appreciated greatly! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Product Level 301 Redirects Best Practice
When creating a 301 mapping file for product pages, what is best practice
Technical SEO | | Bucktown
for which version of the URL to redirect to? Base directory or one
subdirectory/category path. Example Old URL: www.example.com/clothing/pants/blue-pants-123 Which of the following should be the new target URL: www.example.com/apparel/pants/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/apparel/blue-apparel/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/apparel/collections/spring-collection/blue-pants-123 www.example.com/blue-pants-123 This is assuming the canonical tag will be www.example.com/blue-pants-123. Also, if www.example.com/blue-pants-123 cannot be reached via site
navigation would it be detrimental to make that the target URL if Google
cannot crawl that naturally? Thanks0 -
What should be use 301 or 302 redirection for 404 pages
Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | koamit0 -
Help needed please with 301 redirects in htaccess file.
In summary, we're currently having issues with our htaccess file. 301 redirects are going through to the new described URL but in addition the new URL is followed by a ? and the old URL. How can we get rid of the ? and previous URL so they don't appear as an ending. None of the examples we've found re this issue online appear to work. Can anyone please offer some advice? Can we use a RewriteRule to stop this happening? Here's a summary of the htaccess file REDIRECT CODE BEGINS HERE LONG LIST OF REDIRECTS, which appear to be set up perfectly fine. REDIRECT CODE ENDS DirectoryIndex index.php <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks
Technical SEO | | petersommertravels
DirectoryIndex index.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond $1 !^(images|system|themes|pdf|favicon.ico|robots.txt|index.php) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.htaccess$ - [F]
RewriteRule ^favicon.ico - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]</ifmodule> DirectoryIndex index.php0 -
301 Redirect
Hi there, We are re-branding & re-structuring our website, there will be quite a number of 301 re-directs, possibly hundreds. The question is: Should i wait until the re-branding has been completed and do al the 301's in one go?, or should I try and do 301's as i go along? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
301 Redirects
Last year we merged 3 websites into 1 website and launched the new site in February. When developing the new site I created 301 redirects for all the pages from the old sites to the new site. Unfortunately when the new website was created the URLs were not optimised for search engines. I now need to optimised the page URLs. In theory I need to create new 301 redirects from this existing pages to the new optimised URLS. I am concerned that in a few years I might end up with a string of 301 redirects and if I break some links I might loose some ranking. How many redirects will link juice work for? I hope I'm clear here, if not I've attached a image showing what I'm doing. Thank you. unledfh.jpg
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0