Www vs non www and understanding opensite
-
Hi Guys,
New guy here with some questions regarding the difference between www and non www.
I am helping with a site at the moment and gradually working my way through bits and learning all the time. I was watching one of the seomoz videos and it brought my attention back to www vs non www.
I understand that google will treat these as two seperate sites but wanted to check what the stats are telling me.
I was under the impression that www.mydummysite.com was getting most links etc as this is what I have always used. However when I used Opensite explorer it told me something different as follows:
32/100 29/100 5 16
32/100 29/100 2 1,500
Am i correct in saying that i should be adding a redirect from www.mydummysite.com to mydummysite.com ???? I am thinking that this is telling me that I am potentially missing out on 1,500 links to my site but it could mean I am missing out on just 16. Eitherway I guess its something I should fix right?
Do I just redirect that page or would all pages beneith it such as mydummysite.com/news also need redirect???
Can i use Canonical Rel links for this now?
Thanks for taking the time to read and reply!
-
Excellent, thank you for taking the time to come back to me.
(*note for the admin... just tried to reply to this via my HTC Desire and clicking this text box does not bring up the keypad on the phone. Not sure if this is a phone issue or the site not being recognised as a text box.)
-
My recommendation is....ignore everything and decide which URL version you prefer and go with that. Why? Because you have less then 10 linking domains and, in the long term, your site should grow and hopefully end up with hundreds of linking domains.
Also consider, you lose only a small amount of link juice (estimated between 1-10%) when you redirect a link. Of course you don't want to lose any, but you only have a few links and hopefully you will grow to many thousands.
The moz rank and trust factors will adjust after your URLs are redirected. Consolidating your linking power is the primary reason why this issue needs to be addressed.
If I was in your situation I would choose the "www" domain and update the links on your company's website. If you wish to go with the "non-www" site, that is perfectly fine as well. The important factor is that you make a decision, not which one you make.
-
Great that was what i thought also which means I am learning!
The 1500 links are coming from another site owned by the company and I was going to say that the Linking Root domains are higher on the www site so I would probably go with that. However, I just check the Full List of Link Metrics and it shows :
Moz Rank 3.86
Moz Trust 5.59
Moz Rank 4.49
Moz Trust 5.68
Am i therefore correct in saying that mydummysite.com would be the better one to go with?
Sorry for the silly quesions, your help is appreciated. Its nearly 12pm here I should go to bed!
-
If those were 1500 links from 150 domains, I would definitely chose the URL version that was receiving those links. Since those links are only from 2 domains, they don't really weigh that much.
Who are the 1500 links from? Based on the information you shared it seems most likely those links are either from another site you control, or someone who is very friendly with your site. In either case, it should be a simple matter to update those links.
Your site's ranking on any given keyword can possibly change with any change you make to your site. There are too many unknown variables to even take a guess, other then for me to say I wouldn't expect this change to have any immediate impact to your rankings.
-
Thanks for reply Ryan.
That helps a lot.
Am i correct in saying that I should select the site with 1500 links? Seems like an obvious question.
I guess I am really trying to work out whether my current site rank and position can be improved on with a simple change and understanding the stats.
-
Hi Wayne.
The first step is for you to decide which version of your site is preferred, the "www" or "non-www" version. You are correct in checking existing links to your site and using this information as a factor in making a decision.
The 2 / 1500 figure for your mydummysite.com URL shows there are 2 domains which offer 1500 links to your site. I am going to guess that these are your sites, and you have a footer link or something similar which shows up on every page of the site.
If these links are under your control, you can update them to the "www" version of your site if that is what you preferred. Ultimately you need to make a decision one way or the other, and then stick with it.
The next step would be placing a redirect on your webserver to all traffic is redirected to your chosen domain. If you chose www.mydummysite.com, then whenever you enter "mydummysite.com" the address should automatically be changed to www.mydummysite.com once the redirect has been correctly set up. You can use seomoz.org as an example of how that should work.
The method of redirecting your site will vary based on software (such as Microsoft vs Linux servers) and hardware (such as Apache vs Lightspeed servers). If you are not familiar with how to make this change, contact your web host and they should be able to assist you.
This is a very common change which can easily be made. The single redirection will work for your entire site once it is properly configured. You could use canonical tags as well, but the 301 redirect process mentioned above would be the best solution.
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
-
"nofollow" vs. "no follow"
Does anyone know if it is problematic to have a space between the "no" and the "follow"? I just discovered our CMS has been inserting a space and am trying to understand if it the reason why something that we were trying to keep from being indexed has become indexed.
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
I have two robots.txt pages for www and non-www version. Will that be a problem?
There are two robots.txt pages. One for www version and another for non-www version though I have moved to the non-www version.
Technical SEO | | ramb0 -
#1 rankings on both HTTP and HTTPS vs duplicate content
We're planning a full migrate to HTTPS for our website which is accessible today by both **www.**website.com, **http://**www.website.com as well as **https://**www.website.com. After the migrate the website will only be accessible by https requests and every other request (Ex. www or http) will be redirected to the same page but in HTTPS by 301 redirects. We've taken a lot of precautions like fixing all the internal links to HTTPS instead of HTTP etc. My questions is: What happened to your rankings for HTTP after making a full migrate to HTTPS?
Technical SEO | | OliviaStokholm0 -
301 Redirect non existant pages
Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Google Webmaster Warning for Non-mobile Optimized Pages
I just received a warning in Webmaster Tools that my site pages are not optimized for mobile devices and the search results for pages will be decreased in mobile searches. Just got it yesterday and I see no drop yet, but anyone else seen this???? The notice states that the site is not optimized for viewport, text size and proper space for clickable elements. All of that is true since we have not yet completed our responsive design conversion. Any idea if Google will give us a little time to get this resolved, or do my rankings start dropping right away? Just when you think you are moving forward with Google, they pull the rug out again...
Technical SEO | | gametv0 -
Fetching & Rendering a non ranking page in GWT to look for issues
Hi I have a clients nicely optimised webpage not ranking for its target keyword so just did a fetch & render in GWT to look for probs and could only do a partial fetch with the below robots.text related messages: Googlebot couldn't get all resources for this page Some boiler plate js plugins not found & some js comments reply blocked by robots (file below): User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/ As far as i understand it the above is how it should be but just posting here to ask if anyone can confirm whether this could be causing any prrobs or not so i can rule it out or not. Pages targeting other more competitive keywords are ranking well and are almost identically optimised so cant think why this one is not ranking. Does fetch and render get Google to re-crawl the page ? so if i do this then press submit to index should know within a few days if still problem or not ? All Best Dan0 -
Can't understand poor rankings
Hi Guys Our site gets an A for on page optimisation and has much more backlinks and content than our competitors yet we rank no where for majority of keywords Please Help! Mike
Technical SEO | | MikeAquaspresso0 -
External Microsite VS Internal Folder
We would like to create either a new website or a new section of our existing website that will feature (in time) a lot of content including a forum, video training, tutorials and downloadable resources. Logistically, it would be much easier to create this in a new site (we'll call it newproduct.com) and refer people to the new site. We would, however, like to keep all of that content on our existing site for the sake of content building and SEO. Should we: Duplicate the content and use no index no follow and/or rel canonical? Host all of the content on our site and set up a vanity domain (www.newproduct.com) to point people to the deep linked area (www.mainsite.com/product/newproductinfo)? Host the content only on an external site with the occasional link back to our main site? I realize there are other options but they're mostly variants of the above. Our main objectives are to make it easy for people to get to while leveraging the new content for SEO purposes. What are the pros and cons of these different approaches? What seems to make the most sense? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | BeijerElectronics0