Worth Dropping www. from Domain Name to Shorten URL
-
The Moz page grader identified several pages where the only problem is the length of the URL, above 75 characters. The site uses uses the www. prefix, and has for years, since 2001. Is it worth dropping the www. and doing a redirect to https://domainname.com to gain the 4 characters
-
Thanks for the advice
-
Thanks for the advice
-
Absolutely do NOT change from the www just for the sake of saving four characters in the URL. It would mean that every single page on your site would now have to go through a 301-redirect.
You should only change URLs when absolutely necessary, and the reasoning for this change certainly doesn't qualify!
Also worth noting - a www URL has more technical flexibility. Those reasons may not apply to you now but could in the future.
Paul
-
Hi FatRodent2013,
There is nothing to worry about URL length. It was said by John Mueller that: SHORTER URLs AREN'T GIVEN PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT IN SEARCH - Deepcrawl Webmasters Hangouts notes 07/13/18.
Stick with what you've already got. It might be worthy to spend more time focusing on content and giving users coming from google better experience.Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR
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 I change my website urls?
We're translating our website in a few languages (FR / DE / JP) using subdirectories. So our website will have the following urls www.brand.com/en
On-Page Optimization | | dcalexandra
www.brand.com/fr
www.brand.com/de
www.brand.com/jp I would like to change the url structure of a few pages from www.brand.com/section/feature-name to www.brand.com/feature-name Is it a good idea to do this now since we're adding the subfolders and these are anyway new urls in google's eyes?0 -
Downsides on shortening article title?
Hi there, I'm new to Moz: great tool so far! I just tried the page optimization feature and see that (for instance for this article) page titles are often too long. Now it's tempting to just shorten the title straight away, but I have a memory of someone once telling me changing the title will change the URL. And changing the URL is something not appreciated by Google. Could someone please explain if and why this is/isn't the case? And if there are any downsides/things to consider before changing the article's title? Thank you in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RaoulWB1 -
Is my domain holding me back in the SERPS?
Even after a good year or so, my site intensivedrivingschoolmiltonkeynes.co.uk does not rank in the top 10 (google.co.uk) for "Intensive Driving School Milton Keynes", and is nowhere for "Driving School Milton Keynes". Do you think the domain name is being penalised, or do you think there are other factors that contribute to the poor performance.
On-Page Optimization | | Buffalo-Mobile1 -
Product URL
Hey Mozzers, Nice quick and simple one for you. Which of these 2 options is better for SEO and userbility and why domain.co.uk/productname.html
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
domain.co.uk/shop/category/product.html The top one stops stops any funky problems with magento making 2 paths to the same product but the second option feels more natural and helpful to the user. I feel both a valid but I would like some opinions please0 -
Rankings drop since switch to https
Switched hosting companies, and then switched to https for the entire marketing site as a result of needing the security for the signups. Rankings in several (most areas) have tanked since then. Site hasn't changed otherwise, is responsive, fast, and spidered well. See: http://pisoftware.com I FEEL like the redirection is being handled properly, but I can't be sure. Moz reporting duplicate content on the homepage between http and https - but I honestly don't know why. Any help - ANY - is appreciated. Hair being pulled out, and I don't think I'll look good completely bald. 🙂 Kelly
On-Page Optimization | | Kellster0 -
Overnight Drop In Rankings
Over the last size eight weeks we have been doing all of our own SEO with the help of reading this forum and asking questions, prior to this we had an SEO company from India who were only doing articles and promoting them. We have been using various keywords by writing them into our own blogs, to check how we have been doing I have monitored two main keywords, when we started, our choice keyword was on page three, on Monday it had moved up to number one on page two, today it is now back on page three, have we been hit by the Penquin update, if so would I have received a warning in WMT, a lot of my other keywords across the site have moved down although some have moved up, we are retailers not SEO experts so it is a big blow to move down when everyone has worked hard, looking at some pages I do have some pages that look as though they have been keyword stuffed, I have altered some of them to see if anything changes, I have also look at some of the links but how do I know if I am doing the right thing?
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Temp redirects of homepage URLs
Working on a site for a client and the CMS provider has all variants of their domain (.co.uk & .com and / and http:// etc) temp redirecting to the /default.aspx homepage. I know in theory that this means no Google Juice is being passed to the final location page, does this mean that all backlinks that point to their domain are not actually passing Juice onto the homepage? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
301 redirect and then keywords in URL
Hi, Matt Cutts says that 301 redirects, including the ones on internal pages, causes the loss of a little bit of link juice. But also, I know that keywords in the URL are very important. On our site, we've got unoptimized URLs (few keywords) in the internal pages. Is it worth doing a 301 redirect in order to optimize the URLs for each main page. 301 redirects are the only way we can do it on our premade cart For example (just an example) say our main (1 of the 4) keywords for the page is "brown shoes". I'm wondering if I should redirect something like shoes.com/shoecolors.html to shoes.com/brown-shoes.html In other words, with the loss of juice would we come out ahead? In what instances would we come out ahead?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0