Worth Dropping www. from Domain Name to Shorten URL
-
The Moz page grader identified several pages where the only problem is the length of the URL, above 75 characters. The site uses uses the www. prefix, and has for years, since 2001. Is it worth dropping the www. and doing a redirect to https://domainname.com to gain the 4 characters
-
Thanks for the advice
-
Thanks for the advice
-
Absolutely do NOT change from the www just for the sake of saving four characters in the URL. It would mean that every single page on your site would now have to go through a 301-redirect.
You should only change URLs when absolutely necessary, and the reasoning for this change certainly doesn't qualify!
Also worth noting - a www URL has more technical flexibility. Those reasons may not apply to you now but could in the future.
Paul
-
Hi FatRodent2013,
There is nothing to worry about URL length. It was said by John Mueller that: SHORTER URLs AREN'T GIVEN PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT IN SEARCH - Deepcrawl Webmasters Hangouts notes 07/13/18.
Stick with what you've already got. It might be worthy to spend more time focusing on content and giving users coming from google better experience.Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR
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
-
Duplicate ecommerce domains and canonical
Hi everybody! I'd like to discuss the SEO strategy I've thought regarding a client of mine and ask for help because it's a serious case of duplicate content. There is a main website (the business model one) where he compares the cost of medicines in several pharmacies, to show the cheapest shopping cart to the customer. But the shopping has to been made in another domain, within the selected pharmacie, because my country's law in Europe says that is compulsory to sell the medicines only on the pharmacy website. So my client has started to create domains, one for each pharmacy, where the differences between them are only some products, the business information of the pharmacy and the template's colour. But all of them shares the same product data base. My aim is to rank the comparing website (it contains all the products), not each pharmacy, so I've started to create different content for this one. Should I place rel=canonical in the pharmacies domains t the original one? For instance: www.pharmacie1.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie2.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie1.com/product-10 >> www.originaltorank.com/product-10 I've already discuss the possibilities to focus all the content in only one website, but it's compulsory to have different domains in order to sell medicines By the way, I can't redirect 301 because I need these websites exist for the same reason (the law) He is creating 1-3 new domains every week so obviously he has had a drop in his SEO traffic that I have to solve this fast. Do you think the canonical will be the best solution? I dont want to noindex these domains beacuse we're creating Google Local pages for each one in order to be found in their villages. Please, I'll appreciate any piece of advice. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Estherpuntu0 -
Articles URL
Hello, Currently, I am parsing article base on article ID on URL request. For example:
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh
To go to the content of article **What is the visa on arrival? How to get it? **I am using URL like that http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/news/what-is-the-visa-on-arrival--how-to-get-it--245.html and base on ID 245 to get this page content.
But, now I want to optimize this URL to http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/news/what-is-the-visa-on-arrival--how-to-get-it.html. Then I got a problem: How to get an article without ID? Thanks,0 -
Campaign set up as sub domain
When I set the campaigns up I used the sub domains now I question should I have used the root domain. Which is best sub or root.
On-Page Optimization | | PhilSmith230 -
Subdomain vs. Root Domain design
I know that there are penalties if you have a navigation item in your categories that links to another site (root domain) that yields the same design as the original link. Is there any negative SEO implications with having a subdomain with the same design as the root domain i.e. root.com vs. store.root.com And the navigation functionality within will have links to both store.root.com as well as root.com directories? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | customerparadigm.com0 -
Dropped 12 after following SEOMOZ Tips
I changed up my on page stuff via SEOMOZ tips, and I dropped like a rock in water 12 positions from 29 to 41 over night for homes for sale in casa Grande AZ. What did I majorly do wrong?
On-Page Optimization | | sansonj0 -
Custom Landing Page URLs
I will begin creating custom landing pages optimized for long-tail keywords. Placing the keywords in the URL is obviously important -- Question: would it be detrimental to rankings to have extra characters extending past the keyword? I'm not able to use tracking code, but need to put an identifier in the URL (clp = custom landing page). For example, is "www.domain.com/silver-fish.html" going to perform meaningfully better than "www.domain.com/silver-fish-clp.html" for the kw phrase "silver fish"? There will obviously be a lot of on-page optimization in addition to just structuring the URLs. Thank you. SIMbiz
On-Page Optimization | | SIMbiz0 -
How many urls per page is to many
I know it used to be 100 urls per page, but recently Matt cutts has said that they can count a lot more now. I was wonder what you guys thought was how many was to many per page?
On-Page Optimization | | Gordian0 -
URL structure for a new WordPress site
Hi I'm building a new next big thing website from scratch (for a translation agency) and I encountered an issue with the URL structure. I need to chose the URL for important targeted keyword pages and I have a conflict between two tools I'm using. Please read below the situation: domain: mashtranslation.com target keyword: french translation services which URL you think is better from a SEO point of view (and possibly for users): mashtranslation.com/services/french/ OR mashtranslation.com/french-translation-services/ I'm asking this because one WordPress plugin (Wordpress SEO by Yoast) says the URL structure is not optimised while another tool (Market Samurai) says the URL is optimised.
On-Page Optimization | | flo20