Www v.s non www
-
The canonical URLs (and all our link building efforts) is on the www version of the site.
However, the site is having a massive technical problem and need to redirect some links (some of which are very important) from the www to the non www version of the site (for these pages the canonical link is still the www version).
How big of a SEO problem is this?
Can you please explain the exact SEO dangers?
Thanks!
-
Thanks for all your responses - I will use this as the basis of my answer to the technical team.
-
I'm endorsing Stephen's idea, because if you really have no choice, I think it's a good potential alternative. THB's comments (which I thumbed up) are very important, though.
If you really have no choice, I do think the 302 is safer here - the canonical tag should override it. There is some risk, though, and it's definitely not ideal.
I'm not clear on the problem, but could you return a 503? It basically says "We've got a temporary problem - come back later" and, if it really is temporary, Google won't de-index the pages. If you're talking a couple of days, this may be a better solution. If you're talking a few weeks, you may have to take Stephen's advice. You might want to pull in expert help, though, because my gut reaction is that there's a better way to fix what's broken here.
-
Hehe.
Generally speaking, and I've actually come across this quite a bit lately, it's better to just put your efforts towards fixing the technical issues than to try and manipulate the site using redirects and canonical tags. But it's easy to say when it's not my technical problem, nor my money/time on the line to fix it! However, that is always the best-case scenario in my opinion.
-
Agreed. It's a problem waiting to bite you in the proverbials....
-
I worry about setting up a canonical tag that points to a URL Google can't access (as it's just being redirected via 302 back to the non-www version anytime it will try and read the canonical URL). And since a canonical tag is kinda sorta like a 301, you'd ultimately be 301'ing (kinda sorta) back to the www version, only to have a 302 header sent, 302'ing Google back to the non-www. And endless loop, so-to-speak. I'm not sure how Google would handle this.
How about just working 24/7 to resolve the "technical problem" that is causing this? I know, easy for me to say
-
I'm no expert on this but I think you'll be fine IF you:
1 - 302 redirect (temporary redirect) to the non-www page
2 - Add a rel canonical on the non-www page giving the WWW version link credit.
When you've fixed your tech issues remove the 302 redirect.
I THINK google will play nice on this.
Hope that helps
Steve
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
-
What's wrong with this robots.txt
Hi. really struggling with the robots.txt file
Technical SEO | | Leonie-Kramer
this is it: User-agent: *
Disallow: /product/ #old sitemap
Disallow: /media/name.xml When testing in w3c.org everything looks good, testing is okay, but when uploading it to the server, Google webmaster tools gives 3 errors. Checked it with my collegue we both don't know what's wrong. Can someone take a look at this and give me the solution.
Thanx in advance! Leonie1 -
How best to deal with www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html
Firstly, this is for an .asp site - and all my usual ways of fixing this (e.g. via htaccess) don't seem to work. I'm working on a site which has www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html - both URL's resolve to the same page/content. If I simply drop a rel canonical into the page, will this solve my dupe content woes? The canonical tag would then appear in both www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html cases. If the above is Ok, which version should I be going with? - or - Thanks in advance folks,
Technical SEO | | Creatomatic
James @ Creatomatic0 -
Duplicate Content based on www.www
In trying to knock down the most common errors on our site, we've noticed we do have an issue with dupicate content; however, most of the duplicate content errors are due to our site being indexed with www.www and not just www. I am perplexed as to how this is happening. Searching through IIS, I see nothing that would be causing this, and we have no hostname records setup that are www.www. Does anyone know of any other things that may cause this and how we can go about remedying it?
Technical SEO | | CredA0 -
Duplicate pages, overly dynamic URL’s and long URL’s in Magento
Hi there, I’ve just completed the first crawl of my Magento site and SEOMOZ has picked up 1,000’s of duplicate pages, overly dynamic URL’s and long URL’s due to the sort function which appends URL’s with variables when sorting products (e.g. www.example.com?dir=asc&order=duration). I’m not particularly concerned that this will affect our rankings as Google has stated that they are familiar with the structure of popular CMS’s and Magento is pretty popular. However it completely dominates my crawl diagnostics so I can’t see if there are any real underlying issues. Does anyone know a way of preventing this? Cheers,
Technical SEO | | WendyWuTours
Al.1 -
Duplicate content issue index.html vs non index.html
Hi I have an issue. In my client's profile, I found that the "index.html" are mostly authoritative than non "index.html", and I found that www. version is more authoritative than non www. The problem is that I find the opposite situation where non "index.html" are more authoritative than "index.html" or non www more authoritative than www. My logic would tell me to still redirect the non"index.html" to "index.html". Am I right? and in the case I find the opposite happening, does it matter if I still redirect the non"index.html" to "index.html"? The same question for www vs non www versions? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Indexed non www. content
Google has indexed a lot of old non www.mysite.com contnet my page at mysite.com still answers queries, should I 301 every url on it? Google has indexed about 200 pages all erogenous 404's, old directories and dynamic content at mysite.com www.mysite.com has 12 pages listed that are all current. Is this affecting my rankings?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0 -
How to handle URL's from removed products?
Hi All, I have a question about a fashion related webshop. Every month about 100 articles are removed and about the some amouth is added to the site. Most of the products are indexed on brandname and type (e.g. MyBrand t-shirt blue) My question is what to do with the URL / page after the product is removed. I'm thinking about a couple of solutions: 301 the page to the brand categorie page build a script which shows related articles on the old URL (and try to keep it indexed) 404 page optimized for search term with links to brand category any other suggestons? Thanks in advance, Sam
Technical SEO | | U-Digital0 -
A sitemap... What's the purpose?
Hello everybody, my question is really simple: what's the purpose of a sitemap? It's to help the robots to crawl your website but if you're website has a good architecture, the robots will be able to crawl your site easily! Am I wrong? Thank you for yours answers, Jonathan
Technical SEO | | JonathanLeplang0