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.
Domain prefix changed, will this impact SEO?
-
Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change.
Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up.
Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed?
Thanks
-
Thanks Ryan. It seems the results are already starting to reappear which is quicker than I expected. Our web development company should have definitely consulted us before making this change but at least there's no major issue now. Thanks again.
-
Hi Georgina. Having pages go missing after a redirect change is fairly typical for a given time period but they should come back eventually, minus any normal fluctuations associated with rankings. You can do a few things to check on your progress, such as site:YOURDOMAIN.com searches with the addition of inurl:SPECIFIC.STRING to try and find certain sections or products. Cheers!
-
Hi Ryan. Further to my original question, we've noticed some of the products we were appearing high for in the SERPS have now vanished. Although some are still showing. I assume this would be temporary whilst they are being reindexed. Should we be worried? The Web company did this without any warning.
-
Life saver, I have made the changes you have suggested. Thanks very much for your help.
-
Hi Georgina. This could definitely have an impact but since it's a more minimal change (root domain is remaining the same) hopefully it will be mitigated (or very minimal) since the 301 redirect was used. Something else you can do though is go to Google Webmaster Tools, verify ownership of both the www and non-www and set the non-www as your preferred domain within that tool. The same can be done within Bing as well. In addition you can update your sitemaps by uploading them there so that they include the non-www links as the target pages. This should help speed things up and make the change over less pronounced. Cheers!
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 want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks1 -
How can you promote a sub-domain ahead of a domain on the SERPs?
I have a new client that wants to promote their subdomain uk.imagemcs.com and have their main domain imagemcs.com fall off the SERPs. Objective? Get uk.imagemcs.com to rank first for UK 'brand' searches. Do a search for 'imagem creative services' and you should see the issue (it looks like rules have been applied to the robots.txt on the main domain to exclude any bots from crawling - but since they've been indexed previously I need to take action as it doesn't look great!). I think I can do this by applying a permanent redirect from the main domain to the subdomain at domain level and then no-indexing the site - and then resubmit the sitemap. My slight concern is that this no-indexing of the main domain may impact on the visibility of the subdomains (I'm dealing with uk.imagemcs.com, but there is us.imagemcs.com and de.imagemcs.com) and was looking for some assurance that this would not be the case. My understanding is that subdomains are completely distinct from domains and as such this action should have no impact on the subdomains. I asked the question on the Webmasters Forum but haven't really got anywhere
Technical SEO | | nathangdavidson2
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/1Avupy3Uw_o/hu6oLQntCAAJ Can anyone suggest a course of action? many thanks, Nathan0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Loading images below the fold? Impact on SEO
I got this from my developers. Does anyone know if this will be a SEO issue? We hope to lazy-load images below the fold where possible, to increase render speed - are you aware of any potential issues with this approach from an SEO point of view?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng1 -
Help: domain name change and Google News
Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?
Technical SEO | | christyrobinson1 -
How much will changing IP addresses impact SEO?
So my company is upgrading its Internet bandwidth. However, apparently the vendor has said that part of the upgrade will involve changing our IP address. I've found two links that indicate some care needs to be taken to make sure our SEO isn't harmed: http://followmattcutts.com/2011/07/21/protect-your-seo-when-changing-ip-address-and-server/ http://www.v7n.com/forums/google-forum/275513-changing-ip-affect-seo.html Assuming we don't use an IP address that has been blacklisted by Google for spamming or other black hat tactics, how problematic is it? (Note: The site hasn't really been aggressively optimized yet - I started with the company less than two weeks ago, and just barely got FTP and CMS access yesterday - so honestly I'm not too worried about really messing up the site's optimization, since there isn't a lot to really break.)
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Domains
My questions is what to do with old domains we own from a past business. Is it advantages to direct them to the new domain/company or is that going to cause a problem for the new company. They are not in the same industry.
Technical SEO | | KeylimeSocial0 -
Subdomain and Domain Rankings
I have read here that domain names with keywords might add a boost to your search rank For instance using a completely inane example monkey-fights.com might get a boost compared to mfl.com (monkey fighting league) when searching for "monkey fights" There seems to be a hot debate as to how much bonus the first domain might get over the second, but leaving that aside for the moment. Question 1. Would monkey-fights.mfl.com get the same kind of bonus as a root domain bonus? Question 2. If the answer to 1 above was yes would a 301 redirect from the suddomain URL to root domain URL retain that bonus I was just thinking on how hard it is to get root domains these days that are not either being squatted on etc. and if this might be a way to get the same bonus, or maybe subdomains are less bonus prone and so it would be a waste of time Thanks
Technical SEO | | bThere0