.htaccess and www - non www
-
Recently I have taken over a website and I made a pretty colossal mistake. The site was properly constructed via .htaccess to a www domain. Typically I roll without it and I made a bad assumption that the .htaccess was not previously set correctly because there were hundreds of fundamental mistakes.
After a couple of days I noticed the mistake but some of our new (non www) have picked up some solid links etc. So now I feel that I am in a nightmare of creating redirects etc. So should I switch back to WWW or not? Does it matter at this point?
-
Thanks for the reply. There is no duplicate data. I am very confident about this and I have properly constructed 301's to the correct Canonical link. I should have laid the question out a bit better. I am clearly defined through and through to the NON-WWW address but most all of the inbound links are to the WWW link and have a 301 to them. It appears as if I am missing the link juice from the links.
-
either way is ok, but not both.
at least when you have 301 redirect, people that grab your url will always grab the same version of it -
Thanks guys. I was pretty sure that is what I had to do but it is always so helpful in a predicament to get expert opinions.
Thanks again!!
-
Barry said it all.
I recommend you 301-redirect all pages without "www." to the fully qualified URLs containing "www.".
You'll get 90% of the linkjuice of existing backlinks, so just go for it. -
You almost certainly want to define it one way or the other at some point.
Yes, you'll lose a little bit of power through the redirects once you've done them, but at least afterwards you can be sure all the links are going to point to the right place.
Are you better having 90+% to one or 50% to each is the question
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
-
Htaccess noob
Hi all, I discovered that a site I'm working on has some pages from their old site that are stil live and getting traffic. I would like to add redirects for them to the .htaccess file. Unfortunately, I have zero experience writing or editing .htaccess files. Here is the existing .htaccess file: BEGIN WPSuperCache END WPSuperCache BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | rich.owings
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress And here are a few sample lines that I need to add: Redirect 301 /files/John-Doe.html /staff/
Redirect 301 /files/Jane-Smith.html /staff/
Redirect 301 /files/contact.html /contact/ So my question is, should I place those lines immediately after Rewrite engine on, or just before the closing IfModule tag or...? There is no consistent pattern that would allow for a single rule or two. Oh, and I will backup the current .htaccess file first! Many thanks for any help anyone can offer.0 -
Domain Structure - without www.
I'm working on a new project and we would prefer to not use the www. - for name/branding reasons. Are there any SEO ramifications from setting the domain without the www and using 301 redirects for all home page extensions to forward to -> domain.com(without the www)? Furthermore, we will be hosting many profiles on this site and would like to structure them for optimal SEO. Would there be an issue with using sub domains - user.domain.com, or would sub directories be more optimal? Thank you in advance!
Technical SEO | | NickMacario0 -
Removing URL Parentheses in HTACCESS
Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs. Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?
Technical SEO | | JaredMumford0 -
Rel=Canonical, WWW vs non WWW and SEO
Okay so I'm a bit of a loss here. For what ever reason just about every single Wordpress site I has will turn www.mysite.com into mysite.com in the browser bar. I assume this is the rel=canonical tag at work, there are no 301s on my site. When I use the Open Site Explorer and type in www.mysite.com it shows a domain authority of around 40 and a few hundred backlinks... and then I get the message. Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to XXXXXX. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>? So if I click to see this data instead I have less than half of that domain authority and about 2 backlinks. *** Does this make a difference SEO wise? Should my non WWW be redirecting to my WWW instead because that's where the domain authority and backlinks are? Why am I getting two different domain authority and backlink counts if they are essentially the same? Or am I wrong and all that link juice and authority passes just the same?
Technical SEO | | twilightofidols0 -
Setting preferred domain as www or none www
Way back before panda I used to rank for certain keywords pretty well. Of course like many others after panda I lost some of those rankings. I have been getting better since then so its not that bad. I was poking around in Google Webmaster Tools and I noticed something which I need some clarification in. History my site freescrabbledictionary.com used to be indexed as a none www. Then some time ago I can't remember when I set it to www. Tonight I was looking through my webmaster tools and I noticed something that did not make sense to me. In my content keywords section for the none www my list is as follows Content Keywords <form action="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/keywords-list?hl=en&siteUrl=http://freescrabbledictionary.com/" method="GET"> Keyword Significance 1. scrabble 2. words (2 variants) 3. dictionary 4. cheat 5. finder 6. friends 7. maker (2 variants) 8. noun 9. letter (2 variants) 10. hasbro 11. mattel 12. spear 13. found (2 variants) 14. sowpods 15. freescrabbledictionary 16. builder 17. affiliated 18. search 19. solver 20. lists </form> Then I looked at my www lists and its Content Keywords <form action="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/keywords-list?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/" method="GET"> Keyword Significance 1. words (3 variants) 2. scrabble (2 variants) 3. letter (4 variants) 4. points 5. cheat (3 variants) 6. friends (2 variants) 7. finder (2 variants) 8. anagram (2 variants) 9. dictionary 10. tool (2 variants) 11. hasbro 12. mattel 13. spear 14. game (4 variants) 15. mobile 16. affiliated (3 variants) 17. berkshire 18. canada 19. calculations (5 variants) 20. coming (4 variants) </form> My none www version has the order (especially the first 5 keywords) that I want, my www version is no were near it. If I change back to the none www version could I possible see an change in rank? or can it effect it if I change it? I am starting to think I shot myself in the foot when I switched...
Technical SEO | | cbielich0 -
How do I resolve Twin domains? redirect website.com to www.website.com?
I am new to this website. Tried to run a campain and got a warning that website.com resolves to www.website.com which hinders SERP by competing for Keyword indexing!. (website is my domain name) Would appreciate help with this. Thanks. S.H. PS: here is the exact wording of error : We have detected that the domain www.yfvaccine.com and the domain yfvaccine.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here.
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Please advice needed SSL .htaccess
Hi everyone, I recently installed verisign ssl. the idea to have page https://example.com all redirect from non-http to https work properly, but in IE whenever smbdy types https://www.example.com it shows the red screen with invalid certificate. If you click "proceed" - everything goes to normal page and on server redirect www to non-www seem to work fine. Is there way to get rid of the warning? Is it server or certificate issue? Here is the peice of code from htaccess. Please, advice needed! RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Kotkov0 -
Site:www.tld.com rank is it a measure of googles per page importance?
Hello, does the order of pages in a site:www.tld.com search show how important each page is to google? what if the homepage is not the first result?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0