Need Help with www and non-www redirect
-
Hi everyone,
I've been looking around the forum and found some similar topics but none of them have solved my problem.
Anyway, I'm new to SEO and found that when I use Open Site Explorer for the www version of my site I see the links directed to my page, but none of my twitter stats show up. When I do the same for my non-www version. I see my twitter stats, but no links. Facebook seems unchanged. Also, the Page Authority is much higher for the www (I assume because of the links)
It is my understanding that it doesn't matter which version of the domain is used, I just need to pick one and stick with it (on Google Webmaster Tools, etc.). And that I also need to do a 301 redirect for the version that I'm not using.
The issue now is that I have a 301 redirect, and when I type in my url in any version (http, https, www, non-www) it all redirects in the browser without issue. So i know users are getting to the right page, but the Open Site Explorer still sees them as 2 different sites. My concern is that if Open Site Explorer sees it this way then Google may see it this way as well and I could be missing out on potential rankings.
I'm currently doing the redirect in the .htaccess file. The redirect looks like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]Any Ideas on what I need to do to properly 301 redirect the site so that my preferred version can get credited with the links,twitter, and Page Authority stats?
Also, I'm using wordpress and it has the URL set to the non-www version of the site. However, I think I would like to change this to the www version because most of the links are directing to www, and I also think people are more familiar with that format.
Anyway, sorry for the long post. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
-
Thanks everyone this was very helpful. I think I have it straightened out now. I've set my preferred domain in Google Search Console, and have changed many of the links to match this domain as well. Thanks again.
-
To Peter's point, I wouldn't worry too much about Twitter share counts since those are going away anyway. You mention what OSE says about links to the two versions of your sites, but what does Google Search Console say? Is it recognizing inbound links to your site?
If your URLs are redirecting to their correct versions, you're likely not losing too much link juice, and if you've made all the necessary changes in Search Console to set your preferred domain, Google should understand and count those links as all pointing to the same domain. OSE will continue to report on links to the www- and non-www versions separately because of how it reports on subdomains, but Google should get the picture loud and clear.
The biggest thing you can do to show Google "this is the real version of my site" is to start building new, high-quality inbound links. Over time, the volume of inbound inks to the preferred version will overtake the volume of links to the old version, which will reinforce for Google what the correct version is.
-
Try to get as many links changed to the page you've redirected to. Not all juice is passed threw a 301 redirect. I'm not certain on the social metric issues. I haven't seen them to be 100% accurate for any page.
-
Today Twitter make changes and implementing new button so shared will be lost.
OSE count non-www and www as different because bot need to crawl all pages to catch 301 redirect. This isn't real-time or quick so you need little patience. Please check canonical on your WordPress and change all of them to new host (www.example.com). You need to change host in WP -> Settings -> General and in Google SearchConsole preferred domain.
For social buttons - there are few ways how they get URL for sharing. Long story short - with site move you will lost all of your sharing statistics except G+ pluses. There is no way to recover them except if you use data-url for them. But you will share different URL then.
IF you wish to keep number of social shares then you need to 301 www to non-www. Within time OSE will catch this 301 and links will push DA higher there.
Anyway - look messy answer but i know this situation. When you make site one of first job is to check www and non-www also http and https. This make 4 checks (and few more with strange domains as ftp.example.com; mail.example.com) totally just to be sure that site can be seen only in one host. Because later 301 can broke something. And delaying this 301 make things more and more complicated.
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
-
No page authority for https and www versions
In Moz page onsite explorer, I'm getting a page rank of 1 for https://productcategory, and www./productcategory, but for the non-www version, I have a page rank of 33. The DA for each link is 25 Google is indexing my https:// version of my site (with the page rank of 1). Could this be why I'm getting outranked by my competitors (who have no content on their page, no links, and a lower domain and page authority than me?) Does this indicate some kind of issue with my redirections or settings in google search console? I would love to know how to fix this if it could be causing issues Thanks
Moz Pro | | Golden850 -
Pages with Temporary Redirect (CTA)
I had MOZ crawl my site and I had 5 CTA pages with a temporary redirect. How do I correct the issue? Thank You! -Nick
Moz Pro | | X2Metrology10 -
Do I need to set the country in Webmaster Tools even if I am set to apply the hreflang tag to our different country pages?
We are global brand that will be migrating to a new platform in the next few months. As such, this will allow us to fix our current SEO issues. We are planning on using geo-targeted subfolders instead of country code top level domains primarily because of resource limitations. My question is - do I need to set the country in Webmaster Tools even though I am already going to tell Google that certain pages are targeted towards a specific country?
Moz Pro | | marshseo0 -
Mozbar SERP Control Panel Help: Export Results Option Not Available
Hi everyone. For some strange reason, the "Export" option is no longer appearing in my SERP Control panel when trying to export results from the SERP Overlay. It worked fine before SEOMoz changed over to Moz, but now the option is no longer available. Is there something I can do to restore this feature?
Moz Pro | | bashseo2 -
Why do crawlers still track meta keywords if it is not needed in my site?
I have crawled three sites already and it returns more than 5000 errors most of which are MIssing Meta Keywords tags. The sites are on Wordpress and using my SEO plugin I can easily edit the meta keywords of each page, but I am having second thoughts. Well should I?
Moz Pro | | jernest0020 -
301 redirect
Hello, I received a crawl diagnostic report for the website http://www.advancedemt.com here's what it said: Issue: (301 redirect) Page Title URL:http://advancedemt.com/ Redirects to:http://http://www.advancedemt.com/ I called seohosting.com for help: They checked my .httaccess file and did not find anything that would cause this 301 redirect.. Cpanel was evaluated for a 301 redirect and nothing there either. MyPHP Admin was checked for anything that could possibly cause this issue. They had a tech search the entire database and no luck on any issue that may be causing the SEOmoz software to pick up this 301 redirect. We checked the Wordpress settings... No discrepancies. Wordpress permalinks... No problems..... We checked Google to see if they may have indexed the site for the error with no luck... I told the SEO Hosting staff that the canonical feature that has been built into Wordpress would prevent this redirect from allowing Google to index the site with this error. Is it possible that the crawl diagnostics is wrong??? Please help... Best regards, Jeff Bratcher (404) 520-2385
Moz Pro | | Jeff10 -
Need advice on how to proceed
I need some feedback on how to take advantage of some interesting rankings I'm receiving. If you want to know more about my site, or what we are trying to, take a look at my first post on SeoMoz when I posted all about our site, and our story of what it is like raising a child born with Down syndrome. Ok, my SEOMoz tools are showing that I'm raking number 3, 4, 13, and 14 for the keywords "cute down syndrome pictures." That is great, but the problem is it's ranking for pages that make no sense. For instance the number 3 spot is this ---> http://noahsdad.com/more-sitting/down-syndrome-boy-sitting-up-sofa/ but that is just a picture (do individual images show up in search results? I'm a little confused if the tool is showing me rankings in google images, or if that pic is actually showing up in the google search results. If so, is that right? Should my images be ranking as pages? Now my question is how should I move forward. This "page" (again, it's not really a page, it's just an image that has it's own page) is in no way the best page for people to get who are searching for that term. (or maybe it is...?!?) I'm thinking it'd be better for that page to be a full post, talking about some of my pictures and having them show up. Anyways, I'm just getting started on getting this site cleaned up, and really being proactive about the making sure the right things are ranking and people searching are getting the info they need. So basically I just wanted to get some overall feedback on how to move forward, and how to take advantage of my rankings for these words. (I have some other random words doing the same thing, so the advice you leave here I'll assume can apply to the other pages where this is happening.)
Moz Pro | | NoahsDad0