Checklist for moving a site from non-www to www?
-
Hey all,
I’m looking to move a site from non-www to www and was wondering if anyone knows of a list of things to check and update after making the switch in WordPress (i.e. updating preferred domain in GSC).
Anyone ever done this before who can lend some advice?
Thanks!
Dan
-
Will this be on the same domain? If yes then:
- make sure you verified all properties in GSC: www and non www of your domain
- fetch all links from Google search results with some tools like scrapebox
- scan entire website page by page and make a list of all pages/posts/etc (you'll need them later)
- go to wp dashboard - settings - general and change there from non www to www wp address url and site address url (probably you have to login again after)
- empty cache if you have cache
- scan again your entire website and check if there're links pointing to non www version of your domain (probably will be redirected automatically but save this list)
- correct them - in most cases they were manually added
- combine lists of links: from Google and from your scan; remove duplicates; make sure all are non www
- do 301 test with tool like scraming frog to see if all non www pages are redirected with 301 to www pages without errrors
- combined list of links sent to reindex to speed up the process - you need some indexing software or service
- no need to set preferred domain but if you wish?
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
-
Should i stop non targeted countries from viewing my site to stop pogo sticking?
i recently Learned that if someone clicks on your site and goes back within a few seconds or maybe a minute and then goes to the next search result that tells Google that previous website was not so good In order to prevent that is it OK to block non-targeted countries from looking at my site that could stop user engagement a little bit I mean is it worth it what do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
A single page from site not ranking
Hello, We have a new site launched in March, that is ranking well in search for all of the pages, except one and we don't know why. This page it is optimised exactly the same way like the others, but still doesn't rank in Google. We have verified robots.txt for noffollow, noindex tags, we have verified if it was penalized by Google, but still didn't find nothing. Initially we had another site and was on the topic of this page, but we have redirected it to the new one. In case this old site was anytime in the past penalized by Google, could it be possible that the new page be influenced by this? Also, we have another site that ranks on the first position, that targets the same keywords like the page that does not rank. It was the first site we launched, so it is pretty much old, but we do not have duplicate content on them. Maybe Google doesn't like the fact that both target the same keywords and chooses to display only the old site? Please help us if you have any ideas or have been through such thing. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniela.pirlogea0 -
Do I need to set Preferred domain when the non-www redirects to www version?
Hi mozzers, Not sure if I should setup preferred domain when the non www version redirects to the www version? if yes why? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Redirecting non www site
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT: " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain. 301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names. Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
Is this ok for content on our site?
We run a printing company and as an example the grey box (at the bottom of the page) is what we have on each page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html We used to use this but tried to get most of the content on the page, but we now want to add a bit more in-depth information to each page. The question i have is - would a 1200 word document be ok in there and not look bad to Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Please help on this penalized site!
OK, this is slowly frying my brain and would like some clarification from someone in the know, we have posted multiple reconsideration requests the regular "site violates googles quality guidelines" .."look for unnatural links etc" email back in March 2012, I came aboard the business in August 2012 to overcome bad SEO companies work. So far i have filled several disavow requests by domain and cleared over 90% of our backlink profile which where all directory, multiple forum spam links etc from WMT, OSE and Ahrefs and compiled this to the disavow tool, as well as sending a google docs shared file in our reconsideration request of all the links we have been able to remove and the disavow tool, since most where built in 2009/2010 a lot where impossible to remove. We managed to shift about 12 - 15% of our backlink profile by working very very hard too remove them. The only links that where left where quality links and forum posts created by genuine users and relevant non spam links As well as this we now have a high quality link profile which has also counteracted a lot of the bad "seo" work done by these previous companies, i have explained this fully in our reconsideration request as well as a massive apology on behalf of the work those companies did, and we are STILL getting generic "site violates" messages, so far we have spent in excess of 150 hours to get this penalty removed and so far Google hasn't even batted an eyelid. We have worked SO hard to combat this issue it almost feels almost very personal, if Google read the reconsideration request they would see how much work we have done too remove this issue. If anyone can give any updates or help on anything we have missed i would appreciate it, i feel like we have covered every base!! Chris www.palicomp.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | palicomp0 -
Should I move our blog internal....
I wanted to also ask the wider moz community this question. Our blogs are currently run on blogger/wordpress using a subdomain strategy - blog.website.com and has now gained a home page PR3. It's been running for 2-3 years. This runs contrary to best practice of website.com/blog. I'm now considering making the blog internal but want to get your opinion as the longer I leave it, the bigger a decision it will be.... Do the pro's of making the blog internal outweigh the cons of doing so ? Pro's Blog benefits from root domain Fresh content on the site that people can interact with Root domain benefits from links the content gains Easier to analyse user activity Con's Loss of Page Rank Effort to 301 all URL's and content CMS altered to allow creation of blog content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
What happened to my site?
This is my website: http://goo.gl/Brekn It was related to health niche. I am good with the serp for the last couple of hours. I am in top for the keywords: cure for piles, hemorrhoids treatment, natural hemorrhoid treatment. My main keyword is hemorrhoids treatment. And has recently added this page, http://goo.gl/SXNtX This page has some dupe content, as content writer was busy i have copied the content from other sources. Does this have any effect? I have not added this page onto homepage as i dont like google to index it until my copywriter writes the content. Dont know what happened, in the last few hours i lost my serp to no where. Can anyone tell me what happened to my site. Did i done anything wrong? In the last week i have added a link to my ebooks related site. Does this affected my serps? Or did the Google recent change http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html Has any effect on my site? Awaiting for your replies...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dex324344320