Www vs non www and understanding opensite
-
Hi Guys,
New guy here with some questions regarding the difference between www and non www.
I am helping with a site at the moment and gradually working my way through bits and learning all the time. I was watching one of the seomoz videos and it brought my attention back to www vs non www.
I understand that google will treat these as two seperate sites but wanted to check what the stats are telling me.
I was under the impression that www.mydummysite.com was getting most links etc as this is what I have always used. However when I used Opensite explorer it told me something different as follows:
32/100 29/100 5 16
32/100 29/100 2 1,500
Am i correct in saying that i should be adding a redirect from www.mydummysite.com to mydummysite.com ???? I am thinking that this is telling me that I am potentially missing out on 1,500 links to my site but it could mean I am missing out on just 16. Eitherway I guess its something I should fix right?
Do I just redirect that page or would all pages beneith it such as mydummysite.com/news also need redirect???
Can i use Canonical Rel links for this now?
Thanks for taking the time to read and reply!
-
Excellent, thank you for taking the time to come back to me.
(*note for the admin... just tried to reply to this via my HTC Desire and clicking this text box does not bring up the keypad on the phone. Not sure if this is a phone issue or the site not being recognised as a text box.)
-
My recommendation is....ignore everything and decide which URL version you prefer and go with that. Why? Because you have less then 10 linking domains and, in the long term, your site should grow and hopefully end up with hundreds of linking domains.
Also consider, you lose only a small amount of link juice (estimated between 1-10%) when you redirect a link. Of course you don't want to lose any, but you only have a few links and hopefully you will grow to many thousands.
The moz rank and trust factors will adjust after your URLs are redirected. Consolidating your linking power is the primary reason why this issue needs to be addressed.
If I was in your situation I would choose the "www" domain and update the links on your company's website. If you wish to go with the "non-www" site, that is perfectly fine as well. The important factor is that you make a decision, not which one you make.
-
Great that was what i thought also which means I am learning!
The 1500 links are coming from another site owned by the company and I was going to say that the Linking Root domains are higher on the www site so I would probably go with that. However, I just check the Full List of Link Metrics and it shows :
Moz Rank 3.86
Moz Trust 5.59
Moz Rank 4.49
Moz Trust 5.68
Am i therefore correct in saying that mydummysite.com would be the better one to go with?
Sorry for the silly quesions, your help is appreciated. Its nearly 12pm here I should go to bed!
-
If those were 1500 links from 150 domains, I would definitely chose the URL version that was receiving those links. Since those links are only from 2 domains, they don't really weigh that much.
Who are the 1500 links from? Based on the information you shared it seems most likely those links are either from another site you control, or someone who is very friendly with your site. In either case, it should be a simple matter to update those links.
Your site's ranking on any given keyword can possibly change with any change you make to your site. There are too many unknown variables to even take a guess, other then for me to say I wouldn't expect this change to have any immediate impact to your rankings.
-
Thanks for reply Ryan.
That helps a lot.
Am i correct in saying that I should select the site with 1500 links? Seems like an obvious question.
I guess I am really trying to work out whether my current site rank and position can be improved on with a simple change and understanding the stats.
-
Hi Wayne.
The first step is for you to decide which version of your site is preferred, the "www" or "non-www" version. You are correct in checking existing links to your site and using this information as a factor in making a decision.
The 2 / 1500 figure for your mydummysite.com URL shows there are 2 domains which offer 1500 links to your site. I am going to guess that these are your sites, and you have a footer link or something similar which shows up on every page of the site.
If these links are under your control, you can update them to the "www" version of your site if that is what you preferred. Ultimately you need to make a decision one way or the other, and then stick with it.
The next step would be placing a redirect on your webserver to all traffic is redirected to your chosen domain. If you chose www.mydummysite.com, then whenever you enter "mydummysite.com" the address should automatically be changed to www.mydummysite.com once the redirect has been correctly set up. You can use seomoz.org as an example of how that should work.
The method of redirecting your site will vary based on software (such as Microsoft vs Linux servers) and hardware (such as Apache vs Lightspeed servers). If you are not familiar with how to make this change, contact your web host and they should be able to assist you.
This is a very common change which can easily be made. The single redirection will work for your entire site once it is properly configured. You could use canonical tags as well, but the 301 redirect process mentioned above would be the best solution.
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
-
Weird Google indexing issues with www being forced
IM working on a site which is really not indexing as it should, I have created a sitemap.xml which I thought would fix the issue but it hasn't, what seems to be happening is the Google is making www pages canonical for some of the site and without www for the rest. the site should be without www. see images attached for a visual explanation.
Technical SEO | | Donsimong
when adding pages in Google search console without www some pages cannot be indexed as Google thinks the www version is canonical, and I have no idea why, there is no canonical set up at all, what I would do if I could is to add canonical tags to each page to pint to the non www version, but the CMA does not allow for canonical. not quite sure how to proceed, how to tell google that the non www version is in fact correct, I dont have any idea why its assuming www is canonical either??? k11cGAv zOuwMxv0 -
Google Only Understand Image in img src=image path and not data-src= image path
Hello Moz Team Actually for my ecommerce site at product page for one product i have many images and what my developer did for 1st image is on Img src format but other images load on after click for that they have used data-src= image path, data-big= image path so Google Only Understand Image in img src=image path and not data-src= image path? If yes that means only img src = image path will index in google and not other images?2) So in images sitemap xml I have to submit only images scr = images path images only?3) Currently in my images sitemap xml all images are there either img src, data-src etc so what will google do here? He will ignore data-src images or he will try to search on website ? Will he confuse or use by bandwidth or crawl rate? Can you pls guide me? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Johny123450 -
Redirect our www.website.com to website. Com/target-keyword
Dear moz community I have been analyzing the websites that rank in top 20 for our target keywords. All of the top 20 sites except us have their websites re directing to websites.com/target keyword. This is due to probably because they have multiple city's and one of the target keywords term is cityname + word. My question is and idea - make a 301 to our www.website.com to /city-keyword and start linking to that page with new links. Would that bring any benefit? Seems that it's a very strong ranking signal. Any threats that I must take into account? We currently rank as #9
Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud0 -
422 vs 404 Status Codes
We work with an automotive industry platform provider and whenever a vehicle is removed from inventory, a 404 error is returned. Being that inventory moves so quickly, we have a host of 404 errors in search console. The fix that the platform provider proposed was to return a 422 status code vs a 404. I'm not familiar with how a 422 may impact our optimization efforts. Is this a good approach, since there is no scalable way to 301 redirect all of those dead inventory pages.
Technical SEO | | AfroSEO0 -
Duplicate Page Content for www and non-www. Help!
Hi guys, having a bit of a tough time here... MOZ is reporting duplicate content for 21 pages on eagleplumbing.co.nz, however the reported duplicate is the www version of the page. For example: http://eagleplumbing.co.nz and http://www.eagleplumbing.co.nz are considered duplicates (see screenshot attached) Currently in search console I have just updated the non-www version to be set as the preferred version (I changed this back and forth twice today because I am confused!!!). Does anyone know what the correct course of action should be in this case? Things I have considered doing include: changing the preferred version to the www version in webmaster tools, setting up 301 redirects using a wordpress plugin called Eggplant 301 redirects. I have been doing some really awesome content creation and have created some good quality citations, so I think this is only thing that is eaffecting my rank. Any help would be greatly appreciated. view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | QRate0 -
Bad SEO is being done to www.myproactivechiro.com
Since January of 2013 my site's rankings have tanked, I don't know who, or old SEO firm that I left is doing this. A lot of bad links are coming from Russia and are killing my rankings, I need help what do I do, do I just start a new domain? thanks Alec
Technical SEO | | akhlebo0 -
How best to deal with www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html
Firstly, this is for an .asp site - and all my usual ways of fixing this (e.g. via htaccess) don't seem to work. I'm working on a site which has www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html - both URL's resolve to the same page/content. If I simply drop a rel canonical into the page, will this solve my dupe content woes? The canonical tag would then appear in both www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html cases. If the above is Ok, which version should I be going with? - or - Thanks in advance folks,
Technical SEO | | Creatomatic
James @ Creatomatic0 -
Non existant URLs being generated in index
Hi all, I have a pretty big problem with my site at the moment which I'm worried will have an impact on my rankings. I've just had a crawl test done and for some reason I get a load of urls returned that don't actually exist... For example I am getting urls like this in my crawl test and xml sitemap: www.applicablejobs.com/jobs/add/android-designer/android-designer/android-designer/android-developer/android-developer/ www.applicablejobs.com/jobs/add/android-designer/android-designer/android-designer/android-developer/iphone-designer/ All the urls seem to start off with www.applicablejobs.com/jobs/ and there is an entry for every conceivable combination of slugs. I can only assume that if the crawl test and an xml sitemap generator is indexing these urls then Google and other search engines probably are too. Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this issue and what can I do to remove them from Googles index if they are? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Benji870