Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Redirect non-www if using canonical url?
-
I have setup my website to use canonical urls on each page to point to the page i wish Google to refer to.
At the moment, my non-www domain name is not redirected to www domain. Is this required if i have setup the canonical urls?
This is the tag i have on my index.php page
rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com.au" />
If i browse to http://mydomain.com.au should the link juice pass to http://www.armourbackups.com.au?
Will this solve duplicate content problems?
Thanks
-
Dan is correct and the biggest reason to redirect the www to non www or non www to www is that the chance will always exist that they will be seen as two sites and by virtue of that you will split the value of the site. We see it every day when we take on new clients. While the DA is the same on both, the PA for a home page or important other ranking page is different. One I just finished sending a proposal on has a DA of 23 for the site. The www version home page has a PA of 32 while the non www version has a PA of 21. There are four links on the non www that do not exist on the www.
So, your call, Dan is right.
Best
-
Hi
A canonical is kind of like a last resort if a redirect can't be used - and best applies to handling campaign URL parameters and session IDs etc. You really ought to redirect all possible variations of the homepage to one singular URL no matter what. This way people will only link to one version of it (or at least be more likely to).
-Dan
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
-
Is 301 redirect the only way when using Vanity URLs?
We have been using vanity urls for some of our pages. Mostly the pages that have a vanity URL have a long URL length. But now the problem is, the vanity URL is getting displayed on the search engine when the particular keyword related to the page is entered. I checked the google search console, the vanity URL is indexed and the original URL remains unindexed. What should I do? Is adding 301 redirect to the vanity URLs are solution? Since some of vanity URLs are not redirecting to the original. Some of the original pages are not getting traffic. Also, can using canonical tag help?
Technical SEO | | tejasbansode0 -
I have a question about the impact of a root domain redirect on site-wide redirects and slugs.
I have a question about the impact (if any) of site-wide redirects for DNS/hosting change purposes. I am preparing to redirect the domain for a site I manage from https://siteImanage.com to https://www.siteImanage.com. Traffic to the site currently redirects in reverse, from https://www.siteImanage.com to https://siteImanage.com. Based on my research, I understand that making this change should not affect the site’s excellent SEO as long as my canonical tags are updated and a 301 redirect is in place. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a potential consequence of this switch I’m not considering. Because this redirect lives at the root of all the site’s slugs and existing redirects, will it technically produce a redirect chain or a redirect loop? If it does, is that problematic? Thanks for your input!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms0 -
Using 410 To Remove URLs Starting With Same Word
We had a spam injection a few months ago. We successfully cleaned up the site and resubmitted to google. I recently received a notification showing a spike in 404 errors. All of the URLS have a common word at the beginning injected via the spam: sitename.com/mono
Technical SEO | | vikasnwu
sitename.com/mono.php?buy-good-essays
sitename.com/mono.php?professional-paper-writer There's about 100 total URLS with the same syntax with the word "mono" in them. Based on my research, it seems that it would be best to serve a 410. I wanted to know what the line of HTACCESS code would be to do that in bulk for any URL that has the word "mono" after the sitename.com/0 -
Best Practice for www and non www
How is the best way to handle all the different variations of a website in terms of www | non www | http | https? In Google Search Console, I have all 4 versions and I have selected a preference. In Open Site Explorer I can see that the www and non www versions are treated differently with one group of links pointing to each version of the same page. This gives a different PA score. eg. http://mydomain.com DA 25 PA 35 http://www.mydomain.com DA 19 PA 21 Each version of the home page having it's only set of links and scores. Should I try and "consolidate" all the scores into one page? Should I set up redirects to my preferred version of the website? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | I.AM.Strategist0 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
Creating a CSV file for uploading 301 redirect URL map
Hi if i'm bulk uploading 301 redirects whats needed to create a csv file? is it just a case of creating an excel spreadsheet & have the old urls in column A and new urls in column B and then just convert to csv and upload ? or do i need to put in other details or paremeters etc etc ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How best to redirect URL from expired classified ads?
We have problem because our content are classifieds. Every ad expired after one or two mounts and then ad becomes inactive and we keep his page for one mount latter like a same page but we ad a notice that ad is inactive. After that we delete the ad and his page but need to redirect that URL to search results page which contains similar ads because we don't want to lose the traffic form that pages. How is the best way to redirect ad URL? Our thinking was to redirect internal without 301 redirection because the httacces file will be very big after a while and we are thinking to try a canonicalization because we don't want engine to think that we have to much duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | Donaab0
