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!
-
In that case, you really don't need the 301 redirects. The canonical tags should have updated correctly when you made the change in your platform.
-
This is what I ended up doing. I changed the preferred version on the platform and also in Google. We will see what happens! Thank you...
-
I think the better way to pass the authority is to set the canonical tags on the page to the www. version of your site. This passes the same amount of link juice and page rank as a 301 redirect. If you were changing the URL completely I would say a 301 redirect would be best practice, but I think the canonical tag is more appropriate here. Do you have the ability to set the preferred version of your URLs in your store settings on your platform?
-
Hi guys,
Thanks for the response. I will do that... I have already submitted the non-www as my preferred domain but will go back and switch to the www. Thanks!
-
Hi James, As long as you set up your 301 redirects properly everything should be fine, even without changing any of the backlinks. The amount of authority and link juice lost via the 301 should be minimal at best, especially when the redirect is on the same root domain.
In a situation like this it's good to set your preferred www URL in webmaster tools to make things nice and clear for Google. In webmaster tools get them to fetch the new www URL and submit it for indexing again. Ranking loss is usually minimal even when using a completely different domain name.
-
Hi James,
Yes you can do it by using 301 redirect. I am quoting moz on this issue
"A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website."
So it would be best idea to use 301 redirect in your case, maximum link juice will pass you don't have to worry about ranking
Second thing I would like to suggest you choose preferred domain from webmaster tools by following steps
Log in to Google Webmaster Tools and follow these steps:
- Click on your site on the Webmaster Tools home page.
- Click on the gear icon and then click Site Settings.
- Find the Preferred domain section and select the option you want.
Thanks
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
-
On-site Search - Revisited (again, *zZz*)
Howdy Moz fans! Okay so there's a mountain of information out there on the webernet about internal search results... but i'm finding some contradiction and a lot of pre-2014 stuff. Id like to hear some 2016 opinion and specifically around a couple of thoughts of my own, as well as some i've deduced from other sources. For clarity, I work on a large retail site with over 4 million products (product pages), and my predicament is thus - I want Google to be able to find and rank my product pages. Yes, I can link to a number of the best ones by creating well planned links via categorisation, silos, efficient menus etc (done), but can I utilise site search for this purpose? It was my understanding that Google bots don't/can't/won't use a search function... how could it? It's like expeciting it to find your members only area, it can't login! How can it find and index the millions of combinations of search results without typing in "XXXXL underpants" and all the other search combinations? Do I really need to robots.txt my search query parameter? How/why/when would googlebot generate that query parameter? Site Search is B.A.D - I read this everywhere I go, but is it really? I've read - "It eats up all your search quota", "search results have no content and are classed as spam", "results pages have no value" I want to find a positive SEO output to having a search function on my website, not just try and stifle Mr Googlebot. What I am trying to learn here is what the options are, and what are their outcomes? So far I have - _Robots.txt - _Remove the search pages from Google _No Index - _Allow the crawl but don't index the search pages. _No Follow - _I'm not sure this is even a valid idea, but I picked it up somewhere out there. _Just leave it alone - _Some of your search results might get ranked and bring traffic in. It appears that each and every option has it's positive and negative connotations. It'd be great to hear from this here community on their experiences in this practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Elton0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Business Listing sites SEO
How websites like justdial, askme, indiamart, tradeindia do their search engine optimization? Is it different from normal seo? please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Site redesign..have I done everything?
Hello, We have a site that was recently put through the redesign process-a couple of weeks ago. It was a tired site that was optimized well, but still struggled because it was so outdated. I went ahead and re-optimized, submitted a new sitemap, and did the fetch. Have I missed a step? Could someone offer insight into what they do when a site is redesigned and the steps taken to make sure that Google crawls and "appreciates" 🙂 the new site as soon as possible? Thanks in advance for any and all help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Implications from portfolio site
I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding links coming into main site from another site in the client portfolio. The main site we are working on has been going great, organic traffic has grown considerably. The past few weeks there has been a subtle decline including ranking for a few keywords down a little. What I have noticed is that there is another site in the portfolio (that I am not working on) has had a steady tailspin in organic traffic since Jan and i've been informed it is a dying site in terms of the products offered. This has some links in the main menu going directly to the main site. My gut feeling is to isolate the secondary site from the main (no-follow or remove links), but the impact on slightly dropped rankings on the main site is not directly related to those linked pages. Would you go for it and isolate anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Site not progressing at all....
We relaunched our site almost a year ago after our old site dropped out of ranking due to what we think was overused anchor text.... We transferred over the content to the new site, but started fresh in terms of links etc. And did not redirect the old site. Since the launch we have focused on producing good content and social, but the site has made no progress at all. The only factor I can think off is that one site linked to us from all of their pages, which we asked them to remove which they did over 3 months ago, but still showing in Webmaster tools.... Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
This site got hit but why..?
I am currently looking at taking on a small project website which was recently hit but we are really at a loss as to why so I wanted to open this up to the floor and see if anyone else had some thoughts or theories to add. The site is Howtotradecommodities.co.uk and the site appeared to be hit by Penguin because sure enough it drops from several hundred visitors a day to less than 50. Nothing was changed about the website, and looking at the Analytics it bumbled along at a less than 50 visitors a day. On June 25th when Panda 3.8 hit, the site saw traffic increase to between 80-100 visitors a day and steadily increases almost to pre-penguin levels. On August 9th/10th, traffic drops off the face of the planet once again. This site has some amazing links http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/04/algorithmsdata-vs-analystsreports-fight/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesAgate
http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/using/help/business/researchingfinance/stockmarket/ That were earned entirely naturally/editorially. I know these aren't "get out of jail free cards" but the rest of the profile isn't that bad either. Normally you can look at a link profile and say "Yep, this link and that link are a bit questionable" but beyond some slightly off-topic guest blogging done a while back before I was looking to get involved in the project there really isn't anything all that fruity about the links in my opinion. I know that the site design needs some work but the content is of a high standard and it covers its topic (commodities) in a very comprehensive and authoritative way. In my opinion, (I'm not biased yet because it isn't my site) this site genuinely deserves to rank. As far as I know, this site has received no unnatural link warnings. I am hoping this is just a case of us having looked at this for too long and it will be a couple of obvious/glaring fixes to someone with a fresh pair of eyes. Does anyone have any insights into what the solution might be? [UPDATE] after responses from a few folks I decided to update the thread with progress I made on investigating the situation. After plugging the domain into Open Site Explorer I can see quite a few links that didn't show up in Link Research Tools (which is odd as I thought LRT was powered by mozscape but anyway... shows the need for multiple tools). It does seem like someone in the past has been a little trigger happy with building links to some of the inner pages.0 -
What happened to my site?
This is my website: http://goo.gl/Brekn It was related to health niche. I am good with the serp for the last couple of hours. I am in top for the keywords: cure for piles, hemorrhoids treatment, natural hemorrhoid treatment. My main keyword is hemorrhoids treatment. And has recently added this page, http://goo.gl/SXNtX This page has some dupe content, as content writer was busy i have copied the content from other sources. Does this have any effect? I have not added this page onto homepage as i dont like google to index it until my copywriter writes the content. Dont know what happened, in the last few hours i lost my serp to no where. Can anyone tell me what happened to my site. Did i done anything wrong? In the last week i have added a link to my ebooks related site. Does this affected my serps? Or did the Google recent change http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html Has any effect on my site? Awaiting for your replies...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dex324344320