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 root domain to www
-
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages.
"Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate."
Thanks
-
Hi Eric,
I'm glad I could help! Feel free to send me a PM if you need further help.
-
Anders,
That worked perfectly, thanks,
Eric
-
I do not use Apache that much unfortunately (prefer Nginx), but assuming you are using Apache, you'd probably want to add something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^brickmarkers.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.brickmarkers.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
Thanks Anders,
Thank you for the info.
Is this the correct code I be using should use?
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.seomoz.org [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seomoz.org/$1 [L,R=301] -
Both yes and no. It doesn't directly hurt your ranking to use your root domain for web, but it can affect your rankings to use both www. and the root domain. Typically what most people do is to redirect either www. or the root domain to the other, with the most common being redirecting the root domain with a HTTP 301 to the www.
In your case, this means that everyone visiting brickmarkers.com would be redirected to www.brickmarkers.com. This is helpful from a SEO perspective, as the "link juice" will be passed from brickmarkers.com to www.brickmarkers.com, consolidating all of your ranking power to one domain, instead of splitting it up over two.
The problem described in the quotation you included is however that you are tracking rankings for www.brickmarkers.com, but that it may sometimes be brickmarkers.com that shows up in the serp, and therefore the tracking isn't working correctly (or that's at least how I interpret it).
You can redirect the entire domain, you don't need to redirect the entire site. You can use this page on MOZ to read more about the 301 redirect and how to implement it:
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
-
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 -
Forwarding a .org domain to a .com domain: any negative impact to consider?
Hello! I have a question I've been unable to find a clear answer to. My client's primary domain is a .com with a satisfactorily high DA. My client owns the .org version of its domain (which has a very low DA, I suppose due to inactivity) but has never forwarded it on. For branding/visibility/traffic reasons, I'd like to recommend they set up the .org domain to forward to the .com domain, but I wanted to ask a few questions first: 1. Does forwarding low-value DA domains to high-value DA domains have any negative authority/SEO impact? 2. If the .org domain was to be forwarded, am I correct that an SSL cert is not necessary for it if the .com domain has an SSL cert? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms1 -
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Spammers created bad links to old hacked domain, now redirected to our new domain. Advice?
My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links. Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there. The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com". 😞 Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Technical SEO | | usDragons0 -
Double 301 redirect
Hi together, due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times. Example: www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice? Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0 -
What is best practice for redirecting "secondary" domain names?
For sites with multiple top-level domains that have been secured for a business or organization, I'm curious as to what is considered best practice for setting up 301 redirects for secondary domains. Is it best to do the 301 redirects at the registrar level, or the hosting level? So that .net, .biz, or other secondary domains funnel visitors to the correct primary/main domain name. I'm looking for the "best practice" answer and want to avoid duplicate content problems, or penalties from the search engines. I'm not trying to game the system with dozens of domain names, simply the handful of domains that are important to the client. I've seen some registrars recommend hosting secondary domains, and doing redirects from the hosting level (and they use meta refresh for "domain forwarding," which I want to avoid). It seems rather wasteful to set up hosting for a secondary domain and then 301 each URL.
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
Delete old site but redirect domain to a new domain and site
I just have a quick query and I have a feeling about what the answer is so just wanted to see what you guys thought... Basically I am working on a client site. This client has a few other websites that are divisions of their company. However these divisions/websites are no longer used. They are wanting to delete the websites but redirect the domains to their name main website. They believe this will pass on SEO benefits as these old division sites are old and have a good PR and history. I'm unsure for DEFINITE, which way is correct?
Technical SEO | | Weerdboil0 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0