Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate Content www vs. non-www and best practices
-
I have a customer who had prior help on his website and I noticed a 301 redirect in his .htaccess
Rule for duplicate content removal : www.domain.com vs domain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC]The result of this rule is that i type MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com in the browser and it redirects to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com
I wonder if this is causing issues in SERPS. If I have some inbound links pointing to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some pointing to MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, I would think that this rewrite isn't necessary as it would seem that Googlebot is smart enough to know that these aren't two sites.
-----Can you comment on whether this is a best practice for all domains?
-----I've run a report for backlinks. If my thought is true that there are some pointing to www.www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some to the www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, is there any value in addressing this? -
_If I have some inbound links pointing to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some pointing to MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, I would think that this rewrite isn't necessary as it would seem that Googlebot is smart enough to know that these aren't two sites. _
Absolutely NOT, unfortunately. Search engines specifically consider these two versions of the URLS to be two totally different sites. The redirect rule you currently have is specifically in place to correct this problem so the two versions of your site (in the eyes of the engines) aren't competing with each other.
The previous developer knew what he was doing. Leave the redirect as-is. Just be careful that all links you create use the primary version of the URL - you'll retain a bit more "link juice" that way than having them go through the redirect. (i.e. always write links as www.my-customer-site.com/whatever for links in content, menus, incoming links where possible)
Paul
P.S. For proof that search engines consider those URLs different sites, Google's own Webmaster Tools has a setting where you can tell Google which version of the site URL you want to be primary. Much better to do this with a proper 301-redirect though so that you can tell ALL search engines, not just Google.
-
-----Can you comment on whether this is a best practice for all domains?
Yes, it is.
-----I've run a report for backlinks. If my thought is true that there are some pointing to www.www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some to the www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, is there any value in addressing this?
You shouldn't worry about that at all. 301's are just fine. They don't only redirect visitors, search engines like Google also follow them to pass authority signals to the redirected page.
-
You want to commit to one and put a 301 on the other. Googlebot should be smart enough, but it isn't really. Some things aren't best to be left to chance.
Here's the Moz 301 redirect article: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
Edit: Here's another article about www.mysite.com vs mysite.com http://www.stepforth.com/resources/web-marketing-knowledgebase/non-www-redirect/#.UlbGl1Cko2s
-
Ideally one version of the site should redirect to the other version using a 301 to transfer any link juice from one version of the domain to the other. In an issue where both versions have links pointing to them, the best solution is to see which version has the highest domain authority and the most links and use that as your preferred domain.
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
-
Moving site from www to non www and also hosting to vps what will be the effect?
Hi SEO gurus,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 6, 2022, 2:36 AM | SeoBlogs61
I am trying to move my site from shared hosting to VPS hosting and also moving from www to non www version.
What is the best possible way to avoid any issue and without losing the backlinks.
Is it good or bad to do? URL: https://buylikesservices.com/0 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 16, 2015, 5:57 PM | iQi0 -
Robots.txt - Do I block Bots from crawling the non-www version if I use www.site.com ?
my site uses is set up at http://www.site.com I have my site redirected from non- www to the www in htacess file. My question is... what should my robots.txt file look like for the non-www site? Do you block robots from crawling the site like this? Or do you leave it blank? User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/video-sitemap.xml
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 17, 2015, 5:48 PM | morg454540 -
Switching site from non-www to www
Howdy folks, I've got a website that is roughly 3 months old. I created it as a naked URL as I often prefer the look but I've noticed that a lot of my competition has www and also some of my clients seem to prefer it as well. I feel like switching it to www will be of long-term benefit for my site. The problem is that I currently have several pages with first page rankings and a backlinks. I am wondering what the negative effects of switching it to www would be, and how I can minimize any issues. I am guessing I should do a redirect, and I have access to some of the backlinks so I can change those as well, but is there anything else? Thoughts? I appreciate the feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 30, 2015, 12:12 PM | jameswesleyhunt1 -
Woocommerce SEO & Duplicate content?
Hi Moz fellows, I'm new to Woocommerce and couldn't find help on Google about certain SEO-related things. All my past projects were simple 5 pages websites + a blog, so I would just no-index categories, tags and archives to eliminate duplicate content errors. But with Woocommerce Product categories and tags, I've noticed that many e-Commerce websites with a high domain authority actually rank for certain keywords just by having their category/tags indexed. For example keyword 'hippie clothes' = etsy.com/category/hippie-clothes (fictional example) The problem is that if I have 100 products and 10 categories & tags on my site it creates THOUSANDS of duplicate content errors, but If I 'non index' categories and tags they will never rank well once my domain authority rises... Anyone has experience/comments about this? I use SEO by Yoast plugin. Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 5, 2016, 3:32 PM | marcandre1 -
Tabs and duplicate content?
We own this site http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/ and just a little concerned as I right clicked open in new tab on the tab content section and it went to a new page For example if you right click on the price tab and click open in new tab you will end up with the url
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 25, 2013, 11:55 AM | BobAnderson
http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/#tabThree Does this mean that our content is being duplicated onto another page? If so what should I do?0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 1, 2024, 9:51 AM | Creode0 -
Capitals in url creates duplicate content?
Hey Guys, I had a quick look around however I couldn't find a specific answer to this. Currently, the SEOmoz tools come back and show a heap of duplicate content on my site. And there's a fair bit of it. However, a heap of those errors are relating to random capitals in the urls. for example. "www.website.com.au/Home/information/Stuff" is being treated as duplicate content of "www.website.com.au/home/information/stuff" (Note the difference in capitals). Anyone have any recommendations as to how to fix this server side(keeping in mind it's not practical or possible to fix all of these links) or to tell Google to ignore the capitalisation? Any help is greatly appreciated. LM.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 24, 2015, 10:50 AM | CarlS0