Best Practice for www and non www

[I.AM.Strategist]

How is the best way to handle all the different variations of a website in terms of www | non www | http | https?

In Google Search Console, I have all 4 versions and I have selected a preference.

In Open Site Explorer I can see that the www and non www versions are treated differently with one group of links pointing to each version of the same page. This gives a different PA score.

eg.

1. http://mydomain.com DA 25 PA 35
2. http://www.mydomain.com DA 19 PA 21

Each version of the home page having it's only set of links and scores.

Should I try and "consolidate" all the scores into one page?

Should I set up redirects to my preferred version of the website?

Thanks in advance

[salem4e]

thanks for your answer

that was helpful

[I.AM.Strategist]

Thanks for taking the time to put together such a wonderfully detailed answer.

[mediawyse]

Hi Samantha,

What you have is what are called "canonical issues." By allowing multiple versions of your domain open and crawlable to search engines you "split" your ranking authority and result in the issues you are seeing right now.

The best practice is to choose one version of your domain as the "true canonical" and then 301 redirect the others at the server level by means of mod_rewrite code. Doing so will consolidate your content, incoming links and PageRank and greatly increase the root domain authority of your site.

To search engines, if your site hasn't instituted 301 redirect commands at the server level, all of these versions of your site home page would be treated as "separate pages" and each would accumulate authority individually:

http://yoursite.com/
http://www.yoursite.com/
http://yoursite.com/index.php
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php
https://yoursite.com
https://www.yoursite.com

You get the idea.

Most websites are run on one of three different types of servers...

• Unix-based servers running Apache.
• Unix-based servers running Nginx.
• Microsoft Windows-based servers running IIS or similar.

If you're unsure of what kind of server runs your site, ask your hosting company. Most sites are run on Unix-based servers with Apache. In that case, the server's behavior is configured using something called the .htaccess file.

If your site's root domain already contains a .htaccess file, you can simply scroll to the end of whatever code is already there and append your 301 redirect code at the bottom of the file, starting on a new line. While this may sound complicated, it's actually very, very simple to do. If you can upload files to and from your Web server, then chances are you'll have no trouble managing (i.e. altering or creating and uploading) your .htaccess file(s).

But yes, bottom line, you ALWAYS want to consolidate URLs and present one uniform "preferred" URL format to search engines and users. In your case, that would appear to the be the non-www domain which has the higher Domain Authority.

You can learn all about redirection best practices at the Moz resource here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection