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.
Www2 vs www problem
-
Hi,
I have a website that has an old version and a new version. The content is not duplicate on the different versions.
The point is that the old version uses www. and non-www before the domain and the new one uses www2.My questions is: Is that a problem and what should be done?
Thank you in advance!
-
Good luck!
-
Hey,
the non-www version redirect to the old version - I know, pretty poor. But this is a situation I inherited
So, I will try to do something because now all the link juice is going to the old version and dilutes because of the redirects.
Thanks for the help guys.
Especially you, Jane
-
Hi,
I doubt you will see too many SEO detriments to this, but that depends on how the site is configured re: the non-www version of the site. If you access http://domain.dk/, what happens? Are you redirected to www.domain.dk, www2.domain.dk, or does one of the two categories' content load on the non-www URL?
Google should simply treat www and www2 as different subdomains. I have not heard of ranking / indexing confusion based on using www1, www2 etc. but it's definitely the usability issue that would really bother me. Definitely good to work on convincing the client to hurry up with the complete redesign so you can get it all back on the www
-
Hi Jane,
I don't think that's possible. The client is a bit conservative in terms of changing the domain URLs. I think we just need to hurry up convincing them to finish the last section redesign. I was just wondering what the consequences now would be because of this www2. - referring consequences for the categories on it.
-
Hi Tihomir,
Is there a way you can rename the subdomains? E.g., name the old design / category something like http://categoryname.domain.dk/ and have the new content on http://www.domain.dk/?
-
Hi Jane,
Thanks for the comment.
The point is that the company, that possesses the website, want for now to leave the old design for this category and move the other two on a new design (which resides in www2). The new categories are on www2 and their tabs from www redirect.
-
Hi Tihomir,
Are you planning to give the remaining category a facelift too?
It would be best to include all three categories under the same subdomain (e.g. the "www." subdomain) and place them in folders, e.g. www.domain.dk/category1, www.domain.dk/category2 and www.domain.dk/category3. www2 isn't technically damaging but it's bad from a usability point of view. It's incredibly unlikely to be remembered, for one, and even more likely to be mistyped as www.
-
Thanks a lot Rickus,
I answered together with Alex's answer
-
Thanks for the response Alex and Rickus,
The point is that the website have three main categories. Two of them had been facelifted and moved to www2.domain.dk. Their tabs on www.domain.dk redirect to www2. The point is that on the www.domain.dk left the first category which is still not redesigned.
So, we basically can't remove any of these 3 categories - we end up with one category on the www & non-www version and with two categories on the www2 version. -
Do you still need the old domain? If not you should make the new website reside at www. or non-www.
Imagine telling people your URL "it's at www2.example.com" - most people don't know anything other than www. so it could cause confusion.
Also, if you have the same content residing at the www. and non-www. versions of your website, the two versions will be conisdered duplicate content so you should make sure only one exists.
-
Hi there Tihomir,
Although the www to www2 differs the .domain.com will still be the same, this will be seen as a duplicate domain in a way by Google or any other search engine. And will definitely damage ranking of your site.
So the best thing to do here is to remove the old site completely or just edit it so that google cant crawl the site if it is a necessity to have the old one live.
Hope this helps
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
-
Spanish United States Vs Puerto Rico Hreflang
Hey Moz, So we are trying to figure out weather it is the same if we have Hreflang for "US-ES" vs "US-PR", IF we do "US-PR" for Puerto Rico for its own links we then have to create 3 parts to our site, PR Spanish PR English US Spanish We looked at Apple as an example and they had a "Latin America" for their Hreflang and labeled everything has either "es-419" is that the same concept as having just "us-es" for Puerto Rico? ( see attached screenshot ) We are trying to figure out what would be more effective and weather or not "US-ES" search results will appear for Puerto Rico also. PZVwg16
Technical SEO | | uBreakiFix0 -
Flat vs Hierarchical URL Structure
Hi, We are redoing our site structure and I was wondering what are the benefits of having a flat url structure. For example store.com/product instead of doing store.com/category/product. I noticed sites doing it both ways, even moz.com has both structures ex: moz.com/learn/seo and when you clck on something it brings you to moz.com/seo-expert-quiz (even though following the previous logic it should be moz.com/learn/seo/seo-expert-quiz) Please advise, Thanks!
Technical SEO | | WSteven0 -
Direct link vs 302 redirect
So we have recently relaunched a site that we manage. As part of this we have changed the domain. The webdesign agency that built the new site have implemented a direct link from the old domain to the new domain. What is best practice a direct link or a 302 redirect? Thanks
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
Meta Description VS Rich Snippets
Hello everyone, I have one question: there is a way to tell Google to take the meta description for the search results instead of the rich snippets? I already read some posts here in moz, but no answer was found. In the post was said that if you have keywords in the meta google may take this information instead, but it's not like this as i have keywords in the meta tags. The fact is that, in this way, the descriptions are not compelling at all, as they were intended to be. If it's not worth for ranking, so why google does not allow at least to have it's own website descriptions in their search results? I undestand that spam issues may be an answer, but in this way it penalizes also not spammy websites that may convert more if with a much more compelling description than the snippets. What do you think? and there is any way to fix this problem? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | socialengaged
Eugenio0 -
Multilingual Website - Sub-domain VS Sub-directory
Hi Folks - Need your advice on the pros and cons of going with a sub-domain vs a sub-directory approach for a multi lingual website. The best would be a ccTLD but that is not possible now, so I would be more interested in knowing your take on these 2 options. Though, I have gone through http://www.stateofsearch.com/international-multilingual-sites-criteria-to-establish-seo-friendly-structure/ and this somewhat vouches for a sub-directory, but what would you say'?
Technical SEO | | RanjeetP0 -
Root directory vs. subdirectories
Hello. How much more important does Google consider pages in the root directory relative to pages in a subdirectory? Is it best to keep the most important pages of a site in the root directory? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
Trailing Slash Problems
Link juice being split between trailing slash and non versions. ie. ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk and ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk/ Initially asked in here and was told to do a rewrite in the htaccess file. I don't have access to this with squarespace, nor can I add canonical tags on a page by page basis. 301 redirect from scentsy-uk to scentsy-uk/ didn't work either...said that the redirect wasn't completing in an error message on the browser. Squarespace hasn't been very helpful at all. My question is....is there another way to fix this? or should I just call it a day with squarespace and move to wordpress?
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Robots.txt file getting a 500 error - is this a problem?
Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | themegroup0