Help! added WWW to wordpress site and now lost SEO ranking
-
Hi there Everyone!
I have recently added a www to my wordpress website by going to settings>general and adding "www" to the wordpress address and the site address. After i did that i lost my SEO ranking, and also that MOZ is detecting that im getting site crawl issues stating that i have duplicate pages. an example is below:
any ideas on how to fix this?
-
WordPress should take care of it, I don't know why it didn't happen. Between that and you seeing the non-www canonical, maybe there's a full-page cache in action, that hadn't been invalidated yet.
-
Do you want the www or not?
If you remove it now, you run the risk of people who visit the site frequently being stuck in a redirect loop and not being able to visit your site. When a browser receives a 301 redirect it caches it, very stubbornly. If you now change the 301 to point back to the original location your frequent visitors browsers will have cached the 301 that points from non-www to www, and if www returns a 301 that points to non-www, they'll just be stuck in a loop. If you want to go back I would try to make turn the current 301 from non-www to www into a 302, then change back in several days or weeks. That might not be very great for your SEO, though.
If you want to stick with the www, then stick with it. I'm not sure what I was seeing earlier, but when I check your homepage now with curl the non-www redirects me to www, as expected:
Johns-MBP:~ John$ curl -I http://mefco.co.nz
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2016 20:38:22 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.31 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.31 OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips mod_bwlimited/1.4
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.6.16
X-Pingback: http://www.mefco.co.nz/xmlrpc.php
Location: http://www.mefco.co.nz/
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Expires: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 20:38:22 GMT
Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8Johns-MBP:~ John$
Where did you get the canonical info you posted above, is it from Moz? If so, it's probably outdated information. Remember what Matt wrote above about Moz & Google taking time to re-crawl your site. The way to check what your canonical tag, if any, says right now is to view the page source, ( in Chrome: View > Developer > View Source), and look for it, (Ctrl/Cmd + F to Find in the source, then type "canonical"). In your case, your canonical is now set to the www- URL - I'm not sure if you changed it since Matt looked, or if a cache expired, but it appears correct now.
You could go through any HTTP 301 and canonical settings in the Yoast SEO plugin, (which I see you're using), but I don't think you're at that point yet. Go through and make sure everything's set to www, if that's what you want to use. Really, I think you're almost there, and probably at a point where you should wait a few days to see what happens. I made a huge change on our site last weekend, (changed 99% of our URL structure), and after a bit of bug-fixing during the week we're only seeing the start of the result in Google & Moz now.
-
Furthermore, would me removing the "www" from the general settings fix my issues?
-
Thanks Matt and John, I have run the instructions you have linked me, and i am recieing the 301 redirect on the news page, the homepage is also showing that im getting a 301 redirect (this is with cleared cache, and incognito). In saying this after checking the canonical tag it seems that http://mefco.co.nz refers back to itself (see attached)
Im just trying to figure out how to fix this on wordpress. Yes the non-/news section are on the same wp install.
Silly question, is there a way to wipe all the tags and redirects and just start over?
-
Good find on the homepage - I saw it was Wordpress and assumed that would take care of the problem but you're right, something is wrong.
Also, the canonical tag is set to non-www and needs to be fixed.
-
In addition to what Matt said, make sure you're using a 301 redirect to redirect from the non-www version of your site to the www version. I'm pretty sure WordPress does this on its own, but you can check:
- Open a new tab in your browser
- Open the Developer Tools, (in Chrome it's Cmd/Ctrl + Alt/Option + i, or View > Developer > Developer Tools).
- Click the "Network" tab of the developer tools.
- Turn on recording by clicking the grey circle at the left of the bar that says things like "Preserve log" and "Disable Cache"
- Check the "Preserve Log" checkbox
- Type http://mefco.co.nz/news (without the www, but with the HTTP - this will ensure the initial request goes to the non-www URL), into the browser and press enter.
- A bunch of stuff will fly by - scroll back to the top, you're looking for the first request, in Chrome it'll just say "news" because that's the final part of your URL, but if you mouse over it you'll see the whole URL.
- Check the response code on that request, if it's 301 you're fine, if it's 302 you'll want to update that somewhere. If you use Yoast SEO maybe that can handle it, or you can do it in your .htaccess file. I've attached a screenshot showing a request to http://moz.com, you can see there's a 301 redirect - in this case to https://moz.com - the address is a bit different, but it's the same principle.
I thought of something while I was writing this, so I checked for you, and found:
- http://mefco.co.nz/news DOES use a HTTP 301 redirect to http://www.mefco.co.nz/news
- http://mefco.co.nz DOE NOT always use a HTTP 301 redirect to http://mefco.co.nz (I seem to sometimes get the redirect and sometimes not, I'm not sure if it's browser caching giving it to me or if your server sometimes returns it - you may have to use an incognito window, or clear your cache, or both, to see it, as 301 responses are notoriously hard to un-cache from browsers).
Does the non-/news section of the site use the same WP install? If only part of the URL is redirecting I imagine that Google & Moz may be slightly confused.
-
These things resolve themselves over time. Google (and Moz) have a record of what your site looked like. If they have 100 "pictures" of your pages and they see the www one, well that's new. We'll put that .. oh wait, it's duplicate.
They haven't gone back to see that the one it's a duplicate of is no longer there and is now redirecting. Once the bot crawls the new site entirely, those type of issues go away.
Your rankings should bounce back as soon as Google gets your domain crawled again. In the meantime if you don't have Search Console setup, do that. Go into the section that says Fetch as Google and get them to recrawl your site. Also, if you have a sitemap.xml on your site you can submit a sitemap through Search Console to help them crawl more of your site.
Those two things should get you back on track a bit quicker.
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
-
How do I best optimize my on-page SEO for a magazine-style wordpress theme?
My Wordpress website is set up with a magazine style theme (Newspaper). Maybe that's the issue overall here. Questions: 1) Pages vs Categories vs Posts I currently have a category with a few dozen posts under it. The category page itself has a ~1000 word article on it. It paginates every 10 posts or so at the bottom, but most of the page is duplicate because it's only swapping out a few links. Should I instead make the "category" a page with the posts childed under it? What's the best way to go about that? 2) Canonical and Pagination I get errors about a ton of duplicate content for paginated categories and my author page (all posts are under the admin account, which has ~40 pages or so. Every page is just a list of posts and it bitches about duplicate Titles and Descriptions on every one of the paginated posts). Should I canonical these back to the root author? Same question regarding pagination for categories, assuming I'm not going to be switching them to Pages. 3) Home Page Links Right now my home page just shows a few links to the top posts of all time. After that, it shows the 5 newest posts. On the sidebar it lists a few random pages/posts. There are also a few "category listings" which just shows random posts relevant to that category. Do I want something more static/structured? The navbar does list most main content pages under their appropriate category, but the home page itself is pretty much dynamic.
Technical SEO | | searchspot0 -
Adding academic content for a school in a sub folder, sub domain, or different site?
I manage the website for a school and we are planning to put our academic policies/student handbook online. I’m curious if there is any SEO value to including this content in our main website? This isn’t stuff that anyone is going to link to externally (student orientation procedures, how to enroll/drop credits, academic warning policies etc) and there would be limited internal linking as well (someone looking for course information doesn’t want to see this type of stuff). I’m not interested in SERPs for this content, but I’m wondering if the additional content could help the site’s SEO overall? It is naturally rich with ‘academic’ keywords and the only websites that use this type of content are universities. On a similar note, I need to put up student profiles for potential employers to view. Like the policies, this is not priority content for someone visiting our website, but it is still keyword-rich content, which would add to the overall 'size' of the site. Should this stuff go in a folder, a subdomain, or in a different location altogether?
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Site Redesign - Regaining Rankings
We just finished designing a whole new site that will hopefully convert better than our previous site and we are currently coding it. We are hoping to get the site out in the next month or two (or three!). We want to know what to expect in regard to our sales from SEO. If you successfully launched a site redesign and your conversion rate improved, can you answer this question? How long will it take for my rankings to regain their initial ranking and then hopefully rank even higher?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Internal Wordpress blog ranked and not the main page
hello www.mysite.com/blog is ranked higher than www,mysite.com. i am trying to find the reason for the blog to rank higher which is not my goal. the blog reached the second page and the main domain is no where to be found. is there anything on Wordpress setup that may cause this? thanks
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
SEO friendldy Site structure?
we are in the process or rewriting all the pages on one of our sites and will be changing some urls around. i was just wondering if dashes or underscores are better in the urls SEO wise? www.site.com/word-word-word/ or
Technical SEO | | 858-SEO
www.site.com/word_word_word/ i personally like the underscores better but some colleagues tell me that dashes are better, any tests out there on this issue?? Thanks0 -
My site goes from ranking at #7 to #18 back and forth, daily
I am using a anonymous browser to check this, or different computers. Each day it changes from #7 on page one, to #18 on page two. This has been going on daily for two weeks. Anyone know why would this happen? thanks
Technical SEO | | vansy0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Mobile Site & SEO
If i create a mobile site for a client will google crawl that site for mobile results or will it effect my rankings. My guess is no, just want to make sure. Obviously code will be different.
Technical SEO | | waqid0