Www. or not?
-
Hi,
I am pretty new to SEO. I know I have made so many mistakes and I am trying to learn now here on SEOmoz. At this moment, I am trying to find the answer to a situation that puzzles me. Since English is not my native language, I will do my best to be clear. I hope that a seasoned SEO expert out there can help me with this.
I have a website (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com) that in the very beginning I optimized for the URL http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com. I was even able to list this URL into the DMOZ directory. The problem is that after a while the web hosting company I use - I don't know why yet - decided to make my site available as http://pokeronlineitalia.com. This means that if a person types in http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com, she gets redirected to http://pokeronlineitalia.com (the traditional URL without the "www"). Since when I started the site I was even more clueless than I am now about SEO, I thought that that would not make any difference. Even the guy at the web hosting company told me that that would be ok in terms of SEO. I thought that that was the case and closed an eye. The fact is that now I am using several tools to measure the strength of my site in the eyes of the search engines and noticed that http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com seems stronger. Using a the tool I cannot mention, I compared the two URL and found out this:
The total number of unique domains with backlinks pointing to a specific page is:
137 for the site WITHOUT the "www" and 2,210 for the site WITH the "www"
The total number of links pointing to a specific URL is:
864 for the site WITHOUT the "www"; and 61,871 for the site WITH the "www"
The number of domain backlinks is:
66,928 for the site WITHOUT the "www"; and 61,892 for the site WITH the "www"
Moreover, as I have said, http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com is listed in DMOZ while the site without the "www" is not.
My questions are the following:
Is the site WITH the "www" in the URL stronger than the site WITHOUT the "www"? If so, can the guys at the web hosting company fix the issue and make sure that a person can go straight to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com without being redirected to the site without the "www"? Finally, if the issue gets fixed, will the site with the "www" be indexed normally by the search engines? I have noticed that pages in the site with the "www" do not get indexed. Is it bad in the eyes of the search engines to go back to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com? What would you do?
I would really appreciate the opinion of an expert on this issue. Thank you for reading such incredibly long question.
All the best,
- Mark
-
Thank you again.
I let the guys at the web hosting company do the redirect.
All the best.
-
no. not robots.txt
Your site is on apache, you need to do your redirects in your .htaccess file
-
Hi Alan,
Can you please tell me if I need to do the redirect in file "robots.txt"? Do you know the 301 code to edit?
Thank you.
-
Hi,
Thank you for explaining the situation. I will contact my web hosting company and will ask them to make the change.
Best regards.
-
Hi,
Thank you for the reply. I appreciate it.
All best.
-
www version is not stronger in the first place, but when the two versions exist, it creates duplicate content and one of them finally become stronger because Google chose it as the canonical one.
Now you have to make 301 redirections, and I suggest you to redirect to the www version because in your case this is the strongest one and because www version is generally preferred for communication purpose.
Hope it helps )
-
I myself like to use the non www, but in your case you are right your www version is stronger.
What is happening at the moment is that the links pointing to the www version are still giving your site credit, but when the are 301 redirected they lose a bit of link juice between 5 to 15%. That is not much but seeing how many links you have that adds up to a lot.
All you need to do is 301 redirect the other way to the www. This will confuse the search engines for a few weeks but will sort itself out.
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
-
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielreyes0 -
Tough 301 redirect with a /www in it
Hi Mozzers, I'm using Eggplants 301 redirect via wordpress and for some reason I can't redirect one url. The example of it is below: www.website.com/news/www.website.com As you can see, it looks like there's 2 url's and this plugin doesn't do the trick. Does anyone have any suggestions? Maybe via .htaccess? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Should I include www in url, or doesn't it matter?
Hello Mozzers, I was just wondering whether Google prefers www or non www URLs? Or doesn't it matter? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Reindexing a site with www.
We have a site that has a mirror - i.e. www.domain.com and domain.com - there is not redirect both url's work and show pages so basically a site with 2 sets of URLs for each page. We have changed it so the domain.com and all assorted pages 301 redirect to the right URL with www. i.e. domain.com/about 301's to www.domain.com/about In the search engines the domain.com is the site indexed and the only www. page indexed is the homepage. I checked in the robots.txt file and nothing blocking the search engines from indexing both the www. and non www. versions of the site which makes me wonder why did only one version get indexed and how did the clients avoid a duplicate content issue? Secondly is it best to get the search engines to unidex domain.com and resubmit www.domain.com for the full site? We are definately staying with the www.domain.com NOT domain.com so need to find the best way to get the site indexed with www. and remove the non www. Hope that makes sense and look forward to everyone's input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Www. & Non-www versions problem
I currently have both WWW and non-WWW versions of my site live on the web, and I want to be able to have all non-WWW to point to WWW.http://nile-cruises-4u.co.ukhttp://www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises
I want just the WWW version of the site live.I'm wondering the best way to resolve this?Is it normally dealt with in the .htaccess file and I think, looks like this but I'm not sure: <code>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [http://www.](http://www.)%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</code>0 -
If your site has used www for the last few years is it a good idea to direct to non www?
I had a website moved to wpengine lately and when the developer set it up on wpengine he used http://example.com/. For the last few years the site has been directing to http://www.example.com/ Should I redirect the site to http://www.example.com/ to avoid losing indexed pages and google rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
301 or 302 - www.yoursite.com/uk/content
If your website CMS forces you to redirect from the homepage should it be a 301 or 302 Example includes www.direct.gov.uk which 302's it My view is that it should be a 302 in this instance and almost all others should be a 301 - the reason for this is that you want the www.direct.gov.uk to be the "primary" and one that is displayed in Google, whereas for anything else you want the URL of the location. Yes I know that ideally you don't have any redirection at all...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxonnMedia0 -
Remove www. in google webmaster
Hi. My baseball blog (mopupduty.com) shows up as www.mopupduty.com in Google Webmaster tools. This is an issue for me, as my Wordpress plug-in sitemap will only show up on http://mopupduty.com/sitemap.xml , not the www. version Is there any way in changing the www. in webmaster tools without deleting my existing index. The website currently has sitelinks in search results, and I'm not too keen in giving them up via deletion. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mkoster0