Www. or not?
-
Hi,
I am pretty new to SEO. I know I have made so many mistakes and I am trying to learn now here on SEOmoz. At this moment, I am trying to find the answer to a situation that puzzles me. Since English is not my native language, I will do my best to be clear. I hope that a seasoned SEO expert out there can help me with this.
I have a website (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com) that in the very beginning I optimized for the URL http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com. I was even able to list this URL into the DMOZ directory. The problem is that after a while the web hosting company I use - I don't know why yet - decided to make my site available as http://pokeronlineitalia.com. This means that if a person types in http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com, she gets redirected to http://pokeronlineitalia.com (the traditional URL without the "www"). Since when I started the site I was even more clueless than I am now about SEO, I thought that that would not make any difference. Even the guy at the web hosting company told me that that would be ok in terms of SEO. I thought that that was the case and closed an eye. The fact is that now I am using several tools to measure the strength of my site in the eyes of the search engines and noticed that http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com seems stronger. Using a the tool I cannot mention, I compared the two URL and found out this:
The total number of unique domains with backlinks pointing to a specific page is:
137 for the site WITHOUT the "www" and 2,210 for the site WITH the "www"
The total number of links pointing to a specific URL is:
864 for the site WITHOUT the "www"; and 61,871 for the site WITH the "www"
The number of domain backlinks is:
66,928 for the site WITHOUT the "www"; and 61,892 for the site WITH the "www"
Moreover, as I have said, http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com is listed in DMOZ while the site without the "www" is not.
My questions are the following:
Is the site WITH the "www" in the URL stronger than the site WITHOUT the "www"? If so, can the guys at the web hosting company fix the issue and make sure that a person can go straight to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com without being redirected to the site without the "www"? Finally, if the issue gets fixed, will the site with the "www" be indexed normally by the search engines? I have noticed that pages in the site with the "www" do not get indexed. Is it bad in the eyes of the search engines to go back to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com? What would you do?
I would really appreciate the opinion of an expert on this issue. Thank you for reading such incredibly long question.
All the best,
- Mark
-
Thank you again.
I let the guys at the web hosting company do the redirect.
All the best.
-
no. not robots.txt
Your site is on apache, you need to do your redirects in your .htaccess file
-
Hi Alan,
Can you please tell me if I need to do the redirect in file "robots.txt"? Do you know the 301 code to edit?
Thank you.
-
Hi,
Thank you for explaining the situation. I will contact my web hosting company and will ask them to make the change.
Best regards.
-
Hi,
Thank you for the reply. I appreciate it.
All best.
-
www version is not stronger in the first place, but when the two versions exist, it creates duplicate content and one of them finally become stronger because Google chose it as the canonical one.
Now you have to make 301 redirections, and I suggest you to redirect to the www version because in your case this is the strongest one and because www version is generally preferred for communication purpose.
Hope it helps )
-
I myself like to use the non www, but in your case you are right your www version is stronger.
What is happening at the moment is that the links pointing to the www version are still giving your site credit, but when the are 301 redirected they lose a bit of link juice between 5 to 15%. That is not much but seeing how many links you have that adds up to a lot.
All you need to do is 301 redirect the other way to the www. This will confuse the search engines for a few weeks but will sort itself out.
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
-
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
Best practice to 301 NON-WWW pages?
Hi Guys, Have a site which has 302 redirects installed for pages like: https://domain.com.au/ to https://www.domain.com.au/ (302 redirect) Is it worth changing the redirect to a 301? This is a large site, like 10,000 pages. Also does anyone know how can this be done via Magento? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
CNAME record for WWW to Non-WWW Vs. 301?
I was just chatting with the person who set up our site on our domain hosting and they said they added in a CNAME record to transfer the www version of my site to the Non-www version. Shouldn't this be set up as a 301 redirect? I have hundreds of links built to the www version and only a few to the non-www version. Or Could I just add in a 301 in addition to the CNAME record? This is not my wheelhouse and need a little advice. Thanks in Advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content (with and without www)
How can we resolve pages with duplicate page content? With and without www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
Thanks in advance.0 -
Links to www vs non-www
I was having speed issues when I ran a test under Google Page Speed test and, as a result, switched to using Google Page Speed Service. This meant I had to switch my site from the non-www to the www. Since the switch my page is running faster but my ranking has dropped. What I'm trying to find out is the drop due to all of my previous links going to the non-www or is it because of the site being considered new and is more of a temporary issue. If it is a link issue I will contact everyone I can to see who will update the site address. Thanks everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | toddmatthewca0 -
Www vs. non-www differences in crawl errors in Webmaster tools...
Hey All, I have been working on an eCommerce site for a while that to no avail, continues to make me want to hang myself. To make things worth the developers just do not understand SEO and it seems every change they make just messes up work we've already done. Job security I guess. Anywho,most recently we realized they had some major sitemap issues as almost 3000 pages were submitted by only 20 or so were indexed. Well, they updated the sitemap and although all the pages are properly indexing, I now have 5000+ "not found" crawl errors in the non-www version of WMT and almost none in the www version of the WMT account. Anyone have insight as to why this would be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin0 -
Redirect non www. domain to WWW. domain for established website?
Hey guys, The website in question has been online for more than 5 years but there are still 2 versions of the website. Both versions are indexed by Google and of course, this will result in duplicate content. Is it necessary to redirect the non-www domain to the www. domain. What are the cons and advantages? Will a lot of organic traffic be lost at first (if non-www are getting a good amount of traffic)? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
Does having a file type on the end of a url affect rankings (example www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards.php VS www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards)????
Does having a file type on the end of a url affect rankings (example www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards.php VS www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards)????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHSpecialty0