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
-
Links>TopPages: Mostly image URLs: Good for SEO? Redirect obsolete ones??
Looking at my "Links > Top Pages" report shows the top fifteen being image URLs (jpg files). Weird or normal? Clicking the "View Links" icon for a few of the image URL's shows that the best links in the list have DA in the 30's and 40's, and some PA in the 20's. But the linking sites have names that SOUND pretty crappy (from sites with names that sound weird or spammy) QUESTION 1: Do links to image URLs... A) help the overall SEO of the site's HTML pages, B) only help the specific page the image appears on, C) or are they of no value to the regular pages? QUESTION 2: What to do with the obsolete images? (images still hosted on our site, but do not appear on any pages) If I remove the images, the links will be lost. Which is good if the links are hurting us, but it would be bad for our SEO if the links are helping (unless we 301 the obsolete images to current ones) Thanks!
Moz Pro | | GregB1230 -
Redirects, SEO and More
Website errors remittent of Chernobyl. First of all, I ask a lot of questions of the community and I don't do a lot of answering. For that, I am sorry! I own a small SEO company and the majority of my clients are upstarts just like myself. We try to do the best we can on a very limited budget.
Moz Pro | | underdogmike
With that said, the client website in question, http://bestdefensega.com has been a struggle to rank in the metro atlanta lawyer market.
Here's the story. My client is a new solo attorney that practices criminal law and personal injury law. We launched bestdensega.com to focus on criminal defense and my client has also paid AVVO for a website as well. We recently decided to make a monster website that would have 50+ pages and be representative of all that he practices.
I recently put a temporary redirect on bestdefensega.com and pointed it to the avvo website while I was rebuilding the website. I did this using a plugin.
This morning I decided that I wanted to remove the redirect, so I deactivated and deleted the plugin. The redirect is still in effect. I suspect that this may be a cacheing scenario.
How do I undo a redirect?
Also, I noticed that the AVVO site has all of a sudden shot up to the top of the search results and bestdefnesega.com has dropped past the 3rd page for our keywords. Have I lost all of bestdefensega.com's link juice? Also, bestdefensega.com has a spam score of 7. Why? There are no shady links and everything I do is on the up and up. Also Open Site Explorer says that bestdefensega.com doesn't have any inbound links.
Google WebMaster Tools says that the site has of 500 inbound links.. Frustrated, Thanks0 -
Competitor Analysis (help!)
Hey everyone, I'm working on keyword research, and am at the point of going through my list and doing some competitive analysis to figure out which phrases are viable as far as competition goes. What methods are you currently using? As of now, we've been manually searching the phrase in Google, and using the Moz toolbar to check the metrics, backlinks, domain authority etc. I remember before the Adwords integration with Moz was removed, there was a more efficient way to do this using the keyword difficulty tool. Any guidance/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | RCDesign740 -
Getting Redirect Loop and Oauth Error When Adding Facebook Page
Hi all, I keep getting the following error when trying to add my Facebook page. It worked fine in the past and has suddenly stopped working: The webpage at https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=142287725855094&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpro.seomoz.org%2Fcampaigns%2F173488%2Fsocial%2Fcreate%2Ffacebook%2F127833296954.html&scope=read_stream%2Cuser_videos%2Cuser_photos%2Cuser_photo_video_tags%2Cmanage_pages%2Cread_insights has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer. I've tried clearing cache and deleting cookies. Any other ideas I would try? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | kenc1380 -
301 Permanently Moved Redirect
After completing a crawl of my website: www.getyourphotosonchavas.com I noticed that all of the pages had a 301 Redirect? There is this huge amount of what appears to be corrupted
Moz Pro | | rdominey
data for each of these pages: Please see the attached Crawl report and a test ran from a crawl spider. It looks like each page is a 301 redirect to itself? Can anyone please tell me what all this means? 301-Redirect-crawl.jpg 301-Redirects.jpg0 -
Experencing page authority issues after a 301 redirect
We just completed a build of a new site and used 301 redirects to retain our page authority. In the first week all the interior pages reported a page authority of 1 after 2 or so weeks the page authority began to look more accurate but they were still not as high as the original pages. The strange thing is that when you click on the link to a page the page authority populates correctly but when the page finally finished loading the PA goes back down. Has anyone ever experienced this and if so how did you fix it? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Jo_vortx.com0 -
301 redirect in SEOMoz campaigns tool
I did a 301 redirect to another domain and I would like to change the domain name in SeoMoz campaigns tool to continue to track the keywords, is it possible ?
Moz Pro | | mhenriques0 -
Is there a Tool to compare Duplicate content for non web Live content?
Is there a tool that can give me % of duplicate content when comparing two pieces of content that are not Live on the web? Like copyscape but for content that may not be indexed by copyscape or not live on the web? Does Word or any other program allow you do do this?
Moz Pro | | bozzie3110