Www or not www base url
-
Here is the situation. Developer custom coded a magento commerce shop for a seo client and is having problems adding www to the URL without breaking the site. They wont be able to get this completed until a couple months down the road.
We are starting monthly SEO this June. Most directories and websites link to the www version of a site not the non www. What should I expect since we are ranking for the non-www and linking to the www version.
In web master tools i'm telling google to display the URL as www.
-
The 2 month wait is nonsense. I agree.
I appreciate everyones feedback. We are going to push for the www version, the non-www option is a no go,
Thanks : ]
-
"It doesn't sound like they are a developer at all if" no kidding! I'm not a developer, yet as a project manager even I knew it would be that straight forward...
-
It doesn't sound like they are a developer at all if they can't apply a basic rewrite which is included in the Magento core.
Switch URL rewriting on from the admin panel and add this in .htaccess
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,NC](replacing yourdomain.com with the domain).
May vary depending on the version of Magento although if its a new build, I would expect it to be 1.6 or 1.7.
-
I can't think of a reason why a properly coded Magneto site could not have www added to the urls in a very short manner of time. Like an hour or less..
If you're only on the SEO end of it, you probably already know piling on issues with linking to redirecting url's isn't the best use of your time. I think the decision has to be made by the client. You just need to make clear the anticipated results of each option. Ideally, you'd recommend to your client to fix the URL problem first, and let them know that a 2 month wait for a little fix like an .htaccess re-write is not standard for web developers.
-
ouch. If I understand what you just communicated, you've got a site that had previously worked with the www version, but now, due to technical changes, the www version doesn't function? And won't for a couple months?
That's a scary scenario and having worked with many different developers and systems administrators over many years, I've never allowed one to tell me "we can't fix that for a couple months" and get away with that claim.
It can either be addressed or it can't at the site level or the server level, one way or another. Regardless of development framework, you should be able to set the non-www to redirect to the www version at the server level and it should work right. If there's a massive bug in the Magento implementation, that sounds like a very serious flaw in the developer's skill set as far as I can tell.
So - IF you're stuck, you're going to have a major SEO problem for longer than a couple months.
By all rights the only solution in that scenario is to scrap the www version altogether and NOT revert back to it in a couple months. Change all the 301 redirect settings and within GWT to now point to the non www version. Then work to build up more links to the non www version over time.
Because that's the only short-term solution you can do now from a best practices approach if the failure can't be quickly addressed.
And down the road, if you do this, you'd have to once again reverse everything, just causing you more problems.
So either get a developer / IT specialist who can fix it immediately, or scrap the www version altogether.
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
-
Does the URL structure matter?
I have a blog on entertainment. does the url structure matter to rank my blog and iam also facing the issue of indexing of my blog. visit and check this if i need further changes.
Technical SEO | | Hammad784540 -
New website on new url?
We have a new website on a new url (been up for around 2 years now) and our old website is slowly fading in the background, we are now at the point where the money is still ok but we are having issues running both side by side, we have a calculator on each page and are thinking about removing this and adding a box with please order from our new site here (with url of similar page). Now the issue is we don't want to link for SEO purposes and google hammer us (thinking of no - following these) and we also have a penalty we got in 2012 on the site but we did get out of this, would this cause any issue to the new site?
Technical SEO | | BobAnderson1 -
Dynamic Url best approach
Hi We are currently in the process of making changes to our travel site where by if someone does a search this information can be stored and also if the user needs to can take the URL and paste into their browser at find that search again. The url will be dynamic for every search, so in order to stop duplicate content I wanted ask what would be the best approach to create the URLS. ** An example of the URL is: ** package-search/holidays/hotelFilters/?depart=LGW&arrival=BJV&sdate=20150812&edate=20150819&adult=2&child=0&infant=0&fsearch=first&directf=false&nights=7&tsdate=&rooms=1&r1a=2&r1c=0&r1i=0&&dest=3&desid=1&rating=&htype=all&btype=all&filter=no&page=1 I wanted to know if people have previous experience in something like this and what would be the best option for SEO. Will we need to create the URL with a # ( As i read this stops google crawling after the #) Block the folder IN ROBOTS is there any other areas I should be aware of in order stop any duplicate content and 404 pages once the URL/HOLIDAY SEARCH is no longer valid. thanks E
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
How to delete specific url?
I just ran drawl diagnostics and trying to delete pages such as "oops that page can't be found" or "404 (not found_ error response pages. Can anyone help?
Technical SEO | | sawedding0 -
Removed URLs
Hi all, We have recently removed 200+ articles from our blog. However, those links are still being shown on Google weeks after their removal. In there a way to speed up the process? What effect will this have on our SEO ranking?
Technical SEO | | businessowner0 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Indexed non www. content
Google has indexed a lot of old non www.mysite.com contnet my page at mysite.com still answers queries, should I 301 every url on it? Google has indexed about 200 pages all erogenous 404's, old directories and dynamic content at mysite.com www.mysite.com has 12 pages listed that are all current. Is this affecting my rankings?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0 -
URL Structure
Hi Guys, I'm in the process of creating a very exciting startup aimed at the baby industry. It's essentially a social commerce question where parents can shop for products, create lists of products and ask questions. The challenge I'm facing is how best to structure my URLs from an SEO standpoint. For example a common baby topic such as "feeding", can sit in all three categories: Shopping category aggregates all products related to feeding List category aggregates all lists related to feeding Question category aggregates all question and answers on feeding So for that keyword "feeding" you have 3 potential landing pages. What I was wondering is what is the most effective way of doing it? I was thinking of something along these lines: /shopping/feeding /baby_list/feeding /ask/feeding Would love to hear your points of view on this. Thanks! Walid
Technical SEO | | walidalsaqqaf0