Hi, I am little bit confused in 301 redirect
-
Hi, I am little bit confused I have set my preferred domain to www but anyone can access my site via both www and non www domains, do I need to 301 redirect all non www to www or not , If yes then I want to know Why and If no then also I want to Why.
-
Hi Amarjit,
If you set up the preferred domain in Google Webmaster, in reality that should be fine for most SEO purposes.
That said, it's still best practices to redirect visitors to one version or another. It's doubtful you'll see much SEO benefit from it, but it might make things easier from a consistancy point of view, and it's long been a regular practice of most SEOs.
You can read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Best of luck!
-
Hi Mike,
Actually, I could be wrong, but I don't believe this is required. Google will ask during setup if you want to track subdomains, (and technically www is a subdomain) but I believe this is mostly for the benefit of how the data is displayed in the reports.
For www or non-www, Google will 'count' both as long as the tracking code is on the page. Depending on your analytics setup, you may or may not be able to determine if the visitor landed on a www page or not, but the page visit will register.
Does that make sense? I'm being very broad here, apologies for that.
-
Yes I got, Thanks
-
You would need to setup Google Analytics with a www version and a non-www version to view traffic information. Same goes for managing your site, you need to setup both version in Google Webmaster Tools if you want to see data for both.
Google views the non-www version and the www version as two separate sites, that is why you need to set it up twice if that is the route you choose to take.
Does that answer your question?
Mike
-
Hi, Thanks to all of you. Actually I want to ask if I will not redirect than if someone is coming to my non www version that visit will be counted by google analytics ? or not
-
When you say "set my preferred domain to www" do you mean via webmaster tools? if so google does not have control over your site, so of course there will be no forced redirect.
www.yourdomain.com is different from yourdomain.com, so you can pr can be split (if your backlinks are a mix of both).
should you do a force redirect for www, via htaccess? yes, why? its good practice and easy to do. also it will fix it for bing and other search engines
-
Without additional information, I can only make a guess on your first comment, "I have set my preferred domain to www..." - are you talking about doing this is Google Webmaster Tools? If so, that is simply telling Google that you would prefer they index your www version versus your non-www version.
Depending on your CMS, you should be able to write some code to automatically redirect all non-www calls to your site to their www counterparts. If you are using IIS, you'd edit your web.config file. If you are using Apache, you'd edit your .htaccess file.
Does that make sense?
Mike
-
If you have set your preferred domain then its fine. It means you have already told Google about your preference.
If your website is old and you have made several backlinks on you non-preferred domain then link juice will not be transfer. It will be a better practice if you will do it also through 301 redirection.
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 redirects- how long to keep and how many are too many?
Hi, I was told we have way too many 301 redirects on our site. We have some that have been there for 3 years. Our site is datacard.com . Question- how long should you keep a redirect out there when building a new page and expiring an old page? Is it 6 months, is it a certain time frame? wondering what the best practices are? Thanks! Laura
Technical SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Meta descriptions and h1 tags during a 301 redirect
My employer is shifting to a new domain and i am in the midst of doing URL mapping. I realize that many of the meta descriptions and H1 tags are different on the new pages - is this a problem ? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | ptapley0 -
Page has a 301 redirect, now we want to move it back to it's original place
Hi - This is the first time I've asked a question! My site, www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk is going through a bit of a redesign (for the 2nd time since it launched in July 2012...) First redesign meant we needed to move a page (https://www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk/about-turnkey-mortgages/conveyancing/) from the root to the 'about-us' section. We implemented a 301 redirect and everything went fine. I found out yesterday that the plan is to move this page (and another one as well, but it's the same issue so no point in sharing the URL) back to the root. What do I do? A new 301? Wouldn't this create a loop? Or just delete the original 301? Thanks in advance, Amelia
Technical SEO | | CommT0 -
Where to put 301 redirects in Magento?
I will be changing the URL structure in a magento store from "base/category/subcategory/product" to "base/product" which means i have to make over 1000 URL 301 redirects so our old links still work. Should i put the redirects in a .htaccess file so they stay intact no matter what or should i just put them in with all the other rewrites (in Magento 's URL rewrite manager)? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tilenkrivec0 -
Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?
Hi, please someone help! We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy) So the question are: 1. Can we conduct the action? 2. If we cant, what's the reason? 3. If we can, what would be the best practice? Thanks for help in advance! Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?
Technical SEO | | Squall3150 -
Where does Wordpress store the 301 redirects?
Hi, I've just created a campaign for my new wordpress blog and found 11 301 redirects which I was not aware of. It looks like wordpress has created them automatically. Does any one know how wordpress handles this issues or where are they stored so I can delete them? They are of no use for me. 9 of these redirects point to the same url with an added '/' and are in pages 1 is on a post. I've been changing the permalink and some urls several times and maybe one of these times the Wordpress has automatically created the 301 redirect. But why? I do not want to keep the old url. the last redirect is very strange it goes from http://www.mydomain.com/folder to http://www.mydomain.com where folder is the folder where I installed wordpress. But again, I want no one to type the url with the folder name or even know this folder exists. Any comment on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, David
Technical SEO | | dballari0 -
301 Redirect
The SEOmoz crawl campaign found some 404 errors in my Joomla site poker-brands.ca. So, I figured I would set up 301 redirects in my hosting account to make sure bots don't read that there is a page missing. For example: This link gave a 404 error in the crawl: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager I redirected it to: http://www.poker-brands.ca/download-pt3-pokertracker-software/holdemmanager-hem-hm2 However, when I visit the first link it doesn't send me to the second link. Am I supposed to get forwarded to the second link now?
Technical SEO | | Uramark0 -
301 Redirect
Need a little bit of help on this one. I have a product page which actually has 3 products on the page in question: www.example.com/products I thought it would be best for each product to have a page on its own: www.example.com/product-1 www.example.com/product-2 www.example.com/product-3 however my question is: The page with the 3 products www.example.com/products where should the 301 go to? Can you do a 301 to all the new product pages? Hope that makes sense Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | Paul780