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.
Best Practice for www and non www
-
How is the best way to handle all the different variations of a website in terms of www | non www | http | https?
In Google Search Console, I have all 4 versions and I have selected a preference.
In Open Site Explorer I can see that the www and non www versions are treated differently with one group of links pointing to each version of the same page. This gives a different PA score.
eg.
- http://mydomain.com DA 25 PA 35
- http://www.mydomain.com DA 19 PA 21
Each version of the home page having it's only set of links and scores.
Should I try and "consolidate" all the scores into one page?
Should I set up redirects to my preferred version of the website?
Thanks in advance
-
thanks for your answer
that was helpful
-
Thanks for taking the time to put together such a wonderfully detailed answer.
-
Hi Samantha,
What you have is what are called "canonical issues." By allowing multiple versions of your domain open and crawlable to search engines you "split" your ranking authority and result in the issues you are seeing right now.
The best practice is to choose one version of your domain as the "true canonical" and then 301 redirect the others at the server level by means of mod_rewrite code. Doing so will consolidate your content, incoming links and PageRank and greatly increase the root domain authority of your site.
To search engines, if your site hasn't instituted 301 redirect commands at the server level, all of these versions of your site home page would be treated as "separate pages" and each would accumulate authority individually:
http://yoursite.com/
http://www.yoursite.com/
http://yoursite.com/index.php
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php
https://yoursite.com
https://www.yoursite.comYou get the idea.
Most websites are run on one of three different types of servers...
- Unix-based servers running Apache.
- Unix-based servers running Nginx.
- Microsoft Windows-based servers running IIS or similar.
If you're unsure of what kind of server runs your site, ask your hosting company. Most sites are run on Unix-based servers with Apache. In that case, the server's behavior is configured using something called the .htaccess file.
If your site's root domain already contains a
.htaccess
file, you can simply scroll to the end of whatever code is already there and append your 301 redirect code at the bottom of the file, starting on a new line. While this may sound complicated, it's actually very, very simple to do. If you can upload files to and from your Web server, then chances are you'll have no trouble managing (i.e. altering or creating and uploading) your.htaccess
file(s).But yes, bottom line, you ALWAYS want to consolidate URLs and present one uniform "preferred" URL format to search engines and users. In your case, that would appear to the be the non-www domain which has the higher Domain Authority.
You can learn all about redirection best practices at the Moz resource here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
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
-
Best way to link to multiple location pages
I am a Magician and have multiple location pages for each county I cover. I currently have them linked off the menu under locations/ <county>and also in the footer</county> However I have heard that a link from the page is much stronger, so I am experimenting with removing the Menu & Footer link and just linking to these pages from within the content. It's not really a navigation item and most people come in through search to the right page. Am I diluting the link by having it in the Menu/Page and Footer? I read a long time ago that Google only considers the first link to a page and ignores the rest - is that the case? Thanks Roger https://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | Rogerperk0 -
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
Last Part Breadcrumb Trail Active or Non-Active
Breadcrumbs have been debated quite a bit in the past. Some claim that the last part of the breadcrumb trail should be non-active to inform users they have reached the end. In other words, Do not link the current page to itself. On the other hand, that portion of the breadcrumb would won't be displayed in the SERPS and if it was may lead to a higher CTR. Foe example: www.website.com/fans/panasonic-modelnumber panasonic-modelnumber would not be active as part of the breadcrumb. What is your take?
Technical SEO | | CallMeNicholi0 -
Best & easiest way to 301 redirect on IIS
Hi all, What is the best and easiest way to 301 redirect URLs on IIS server? I got access to the FTP and WordPress back office, but no access to the server admin. Is there an easy way to create 301 redirect without having to always annoy the tech in charge of the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 2MSens0 -
Redirect root domain to www
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks
Technical SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
Disallow: /404/ - Best Practice?
Hello Moz Community, My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/ Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients? I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO. Thank you in advanced, Nico.
Technical SEO | | niconico1011 -
Having www. and non www. links indexed
Hey guys, As the title states, the two versions of the website are indexed in Google. How should I proceed? Please also note that the links on the website are without the www. How should I proceed knowing that the client prefers to have the www. version indexed. Here are the steps that I have in mind right now: I set the preferred domain on GWMT as the one with www. I 301 redirect any non www. URL to the www. version. What are your thoughts? Should I 301 redirect the URL's? or is setting the preference on GWMT enough? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Best XML Sitemap generator
Do you guys have any suggestions on a good XML Sitemaps generator? hopefully free, but if it's good i'd consider paying I am using a MAC so would prefer a online or mac version
Technical SEO | | kevin48030