.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
-
WWW vs Non WWW for EXISTING site.
This one has sort of been asked already but I cannot find an answer. When we evaluate a new SEO client, previously with Majestic we would review the root domain vs sub domain (www) for which had the higher Trust Flow and Citation flow, and if there was a major difference, adjust the Google indexed domain to the higher peforming one. Is there a way to do this with Moz, Domain Authority, and Sub Domain authority are always returning the same DA for me. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | practiceedge10 -
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
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 -
My www. domain has less page authroity than my non www.
I have a webmaster working on the site and I don't really remember how it got this way but it now appears that the non www have more PA than the www. I am redirecting it so I guess it's a good thing? should I move the site so that it's the root and www is the redirect? any help is greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ecb090 -
301 redirect .htaccess
Hi guys I am working on some 301 redirects on an apache webserver and I'd like a bit of assistance in trying to get a specific type result: I want all addresses from domaina.com to be redirected to domainb.com in the same structure so domaina.com/folder/file will go to domainb.com/folder/file expect for 2 folders.
Technical SEO | | seobackbone
ie: DomainA.com --> DomainB.com
except domainA.com/folder1
and domainB.com/folder2 Can someone let me know how I can pull this off?0 -
How do I stop www.mysite.com/ showing as a duplicate of www.mysite.com
I have run the campaigns software over a site and it is showing that www.mysite.com/ is a duplicate of www.mysite.com, how do I correct this? Is it a genuine duplicate page? My first thought was to use rel canonical but there is no page called / to put it on. Your suggestions welcomed Sean
Technical SEO | | ske110 -
Htaccess redirects how many can i have and does it slow site down
I have had to redesign my site this year www.in2town.co.uk because my hosting company made a huge mistake while trying to update the joomla on my site which resulted in me losing thousands of pages and links. What i would like to know is, i have put some of the old urls in my htaccess file but i would like to know how many old urls i can have in my htaccess file as i am unsure how to use it properly. my idea was, to have some of the lost url links to my site and put them in my htaccess file and have them pointing to similar pages. not sure if this is a good idea or not. i think i have lost a few hundred good links but i would like to know if these urls in the htaccess file would slow down my joomla site any advice would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Www or no www
right now our organization has the a robot text file set to block search engines from indexing the non-www version of our URL - example.com looks like this #Dynamically generated robots.txt file for example.com
Technical SEO | | dschreib_greenpeace.org
User-agent: * Disallow: / Of course, we do allow search engines to crawl the www. version Is this the best way to do this?0