Should I include www in url, or doesn't it matter?
-
Hello Mozzers, I was just wondering whether Google prefers www or non www URLs? Or doesn't it matter? Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for input everyone - much appreciated
-
Did you set up a canonical redirect? or did you prefer a www or non www version of your website. If you redirected to a www or non www then definitely use the one you picked with everything.
-
However, you DO want to be consistent and have either all www or no www, and have one redirect to the other, so you don't have both versions (www and non-www) indexed.
-
It really doesn't matter, but it is considered more commonplace to have the www at the front. No SEO benefits either way though.
-Andy
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
-
My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!
Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
Changing URLS: from a short well optimised URL to a longer one – What's the traffic risk
I'm working with a client who has a website that is relatively well optimised, thought it has a pretty flat structure and a lot of top level pages. They've invested in their content over the years and managed to rank well for key search terms. They're currently in the process of changing CMS and as a result of new folder structuring in the CMS the URLs for some pages look to have significantly changed. E.g Existing URL is: website.com/grampians-luxury-accommodation which ranked quite well for luxury accommodation grampians New URL when site is launched on new CMS would be website.com/destinations/victoria/grampians My feeling is that the client is going to lose out on a bit of traffic as a result of this. I'm looking for information or ways or case studies to demonstrate the degree of risk, and to help make a recommendation to mitigate risk.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moge0 -
301's, Mixed-Case URLs, and Site Migration Disaster
Hello Moz Community, After placing trust in a developer to build & migrate our site, the site launched 9 weeks ago and has been one disaster after another. Sadly, after 16 months of development, we are building again, this time we are leveled-up and doing it in-house with our people. I have 1 topic I need advice on, and that is 301s. Here's the deal. The newbie developer used a mixed-case version for our URL structure. So what should have been /example-url became /Example-Url on all URLs. Awesome right? It was a duplicate content nightmare upon launch (among other things). We are re-building now. My question is this, do we bite the bullet for all URLs and 301 them to a proper lower-case URL structure? We've already lost a lot of link equity from 301ing the site the first time around. We were a PR 4 for the last 5 years on our homepage, now we are a PR 3. That is a substantial loss. For our primary keywords, we were on the first page for the big ones, for the last decade. Now, we are just barely cleaving to the second page, and many are 3rd page. I am afraid if we 301 all the URLs again, a 15% reduction in link equity per page is really going to hurt us, again. However, keeping the mixed-case URL structure is also a whammy. Building a brand new site, again, it seems like we should do it correctly and right all the previous wrongs. But on the other hand, another PR demotion and we'll be in line at the soup kitchen. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yogitrout10 -
301 doesn't redirect a page that ends in %20, and others being appended with ?q=
I have a product page that ends /product-name**%20** that I'm trying to redirect in this way: Redirect 301 /products/product-name%20 http://www.site.com/products/product-name And it doesn't redirect at all. The others, those with %20, are being redirected to a url hybrid of old and new: http://www.site.com/products/product-name**?q=old-url** I'm using Drupal CMS, and it may be creating rules that counter my entries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Root domain or sub domain? WWW. or NOT WWW......
I am a little confused! I use vidahost whom I have to say I find very helpful. I currently have the domains www.fentonit.co.uk and www.fentonit.com, now the websites was set up using the www.fentonit.com and I have www.fentonit.co.uk as a parked domain pointed to the www.fentonit.com. Confused yet? Now because I wanted the website to show www.fentonit.co.uk I added some code I was given by the guys to the .hta access file and viola up it comes as the .co.uk which is what I wanted. So if your still here and havent A: Killed yourself yet or B: Went to the Pub Then my questions are: 1. Is there going to be an issue from an SEO point of view having my site set up this way and if so how do I resolve it? 2. Would I be better using the root domain fentonit.co.uk (I think this is the root domain, although it iscurrently parked and pointed) as opposed to the sub www domain?.......and finally.......? 3. If it is set up as I stated what exactly would be my root domain, would it be the .co.uk or the .com? Sorry and I completely understand if your not interested in answering it but if you do.....Thanks in advance and I'll take you to the pub...lol Craig www.fentonit.co.uk ( i think)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigyboy1 -
Does URL format affect Keyword effectiveness for a URL?
I am looking at our site structure, and don't want to have to rebuild the way the site was linked together based on it's current folder structure so I am wondering what option would work better for our URL structure. I will uses car categories as an example of what I am talking about, but you can insert any category structure you like. For example I would like to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford-convertibles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SL_SEM
www.example.com/chevy-convertibles But instead due to the site structure I will need to have pages like this: www.example.com/ford/convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/convertibles But wonder if I shouldn't do the following to ensure the proper phrase is known for the page: www.example.com/ford/ford-convertibles
www.example.com/chevy/chevy-convertibles The "/ford/ford-convertibles" just seems odd to me as a human, but I haven't seen anything on how well a keyphrase in a URL split by /'s does and I know dashes for phrases are fine. This means I am inclined to go with the"/ford/ford-convertibles"style because it keeps the keyphrase separated by dashes even if it is a bit repetitive. There will be other pages too like "/ford/top-10-fords-ever" but I don't wonder about that since it isnt "ford/ford-xxxxx" Thoughts on whether /'s in a keyphrase are as good as dashes?0 -
What are the different tactics for getting ranked/ included in Google finance searches such as http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=NASDAQ:ADBE
I don't know what ranking factors they are using for this feed. The results vary greatly from a search done at google.com or google.com/news and google.com/finance I'm working with a website that regularly publishes finance-related news and currently gets traffic from google finance. I'm wondering what we can do to optimize our news articles to possibly show more prominently or more often. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemascaro0 -
Robots.txt: Link Juice vs. Crawl Budget vs. Content 'Depth'
I run a quality vertical search engine. About 6 months ago we had a problem with our sitemaps, which resulted in most of our pages getting tossed out of Google's index. As part of the response, we put a bunch of robots.txt restrictions in place in our search results to prevent Google from crawling through pagination links and other parameter based variants of our results (sort order, etc). The idea was to 'preserve crawl budget' in order to speed the rate at which Google could get our millions of pages back in the index by focusing attention/resources on the right pages. The pages are back in the index now (and have been for a while), and the restrictions have stayed in place since that time. But, in doing a little SEOMoz reading this morning, I came to wonder whether that approach may now be harming us... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurus
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions Specifically, I'm concerned that a) we're blocking the flow of link juice and that b) by preventing Google from crawling the full depth of our search results (i.e. pages >1), we may be making our site wrongfully look 'thin'. With respect to b), we've been hit by Panda and have been implementing plenty of changes to improve engagement, eliminate inadvertently low quality pages, etc, but we have yet to find 'the fix'... Thoughts? Kurus0