Removing www from printed and digital
-
I wanted to make sure there will be no negative SEO implications if we change all ‘www.fdmgroup.com' references (printed and digital)?After some Googling, apparently some search engines regard www.fdmgroup.com and fdmgroup.com as two different websites and split SEO rankings (quote me if i’m wrong!).To date, a lot (if not all) of our online presence (e.g. adverts, banner links etc) use www.fdmgroup.com (both visually and in HTML markup) so these would also need updating to remove the 'www'.What are your thoughts? For the sake of SEO and canonical/duplicate content/ranking issues etc, would changing all www.fdmgroup.com references have a negative effect?
-
Hi Christopher,
The set-up you have at the moment is actually fine for SEO - http://www.fdmgroup.com/ resolves the website. http://fdmgroup.com/ employs a 301 redirect to take users and search engines to http://www.fdmgroup.com/: http://i.imgur.com/et4AKYV.png
This is correct, http://fdmgroup.com/ would be seen as a separate "version" of the home page if it was allowed to load without sending everyone on to the "www" version via the 301 redirect. Furthermore, every page within the http://fdmgroup.com/ "version" of the website would be duplicated from the "www" version of each page.
If you want to change to use http://fdmgroup.com/ instead, using that both on advertising and having that be the version of the website that resolves for both users and search engines, you will need to reverse that 301 redirect. This will mean that when people try to visit http://**www.**fdmgroup.com/, they are redirected to http://fdmgroup.com/. This is a simple process.
However, it is inadvisable to go through redirection like this unless you really, really have to. When you redirect a URL with a 301 redirect, a large portion of the URL's authority is passed on to the new URL. Not all of the authority is passed though. As a result, your rankings and traffic can take a little hit for a short while. This is not usually a big problem, and usually resolves itself quickly but it is best avoided unless the redirection really has to take place.
I am tempted to say that "it looks cleaner" is not the best reason to go through this change when your current set-up is totally fine and correct for SEO purposes.
That said, you absolutely could reference fdmgroup.com in offline advertising for stylistic purposes. When people type that URL in, they'll be redirected to the www version just as they are now. This is pretty common because of the stylistic benefits of not including www in TV / print advertising.
-
It looks cleaner without the www. Would it affect it negatively if we changed it? Thanks.
-
Not to mention if you've set up preferred domain or canonical this doesn't even matter. The only thing you may consider is it easier to advertise (branding) with out www.
-
www is considered a subdomain of the main domain.
Generally speaking, Google will give the main domain credit for what is on the subdomain. I don't think this is always the case though if you have really specific content on a subdomain and it is targeted for a certain topic because people would start linking to the subdomain as opposed to the main domain. So I think the correct answer is that it depends on your site and situation. If you can, everything should go on 1 domain unless it makes sense for some other reason to split things on multiple domains/subdomains.
If you have a ton of advertising out there for www...., why change it? Most people don't know that www is a subdomain (or care). You are not going to pick up a significant advantage SEO wise by switching to the main domain vs using the www version, so just don't mess with it.
Unless for some reason you have a good reason to create a bunch of subdomains, like if you had a real estate site nationwide and you wanted them to be organized by city like houston.mysite.com, atlanta.mysite.com, etc.
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
-
301 vs 410 redirect: What to use when removing a URL from the website
We are in the process of detemining how to handle URLs that are completely removed from our website? Think of these as listings that have an expiration date (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/test-prep/tphU3/sat-group-course). What is the best practice for removing these listings (assuming not many people are linking to them externally). 301 to a general page (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/search/test-prep) Do nothing and leave them up but remove from the site map (as they are no longer useful from a user perspective) return a 404 or 410?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abargmann0 -
Add noindex,nofollow prior to removing pages resulting in 404's
We're working with another site that unfortunately due to how their website has been programmed creates a bit of a mess. Whenever an employee removes a page from their site through their homegrown 'content management system', rather than 301'ing to another location on their site, the page is deleted and results in a 404. The interim question until they implement a better solution in managing their website is: Should they first add noindex,nofollow to the pages that are scheduled to be removed. Then once they are removed, they become 404's? Of note, it is possible that some of these pages will be used again in the future, and I would imagine they could submit them to Google through Webmaster Tools and adding the pages to their sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
To recover from Penguin update, shall i remove the links or disavow links?
Hi, One of our websites hit by Penguin update and I now know where the links are coming from. I have chance to remove the links from those incoming links but I am a little confused whether i should just remove the links from incoming links or disavow the links? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?
This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months. To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search. When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago). We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video. They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index. Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap. We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap. After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages. That makes sense. We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail. However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months. Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags. That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
Unnatural Links Removal - are GWMT links enough?
Hi, When working on unnatural links penalty, is removing and disavowing links shown on the GWMT enough or should the list be broaden to include OSE and Majestic etc.? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Remove content that is indexed?
Hi guys, I want to delete a entire folder with content indexed, how i can explain to google that content no longer exists?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Valarlf0 -
Removed Internal Rel=NoFollows from power internal page - how long till reflected in Google?
I just started with a client, who has an internal page (not the homepage) that gets about 70% of all total links to the site and ranks #1 for a highly competitive keyword. For some reason, the first set of links, including the first anchor text link to the homepage are nofollowed. I removed the nofollows yesterday. Today, The internal page has already been reindexed in Google showing the followed anchor text link to the homepage Should I expect a jump in link juice pointing to my homepage immediately with a corresponding rankings boost? Homepage is #8 for target term. I hope this makes sense. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattAaron0