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
-
Moving site from www to non www and also hosting to vps what will be the effect?
Hi SEO gurus,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoBlogs61
I am trying to move my site from shared hosting to VPS hosting and also moving from www to non www version.
What is the best possible way to avoid any issue and without losing the backlinks.
Is it good or bad to do? URL: https://buylikesservices.com/0 -
Duplicate Content www vs. non-www and best practices
I have a customer who had prior help on his website and I noticed a 301 redirect in his .htaccess Rule for duplicate content removal : www.domain.com vs domain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnvoyWeb
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com/$1 [R=301,L,NC] The result of this rule is that i type MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com in the browser and it redirects to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com I wonder if this is causing issues in SERPS. If I have some inbound links pointing to www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some pointing to MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, I would think that this rewrite isn't necessary as it would seem that Googlebot is smart enough to know that these aren't two sites. -----Can you comment on whether this is a best practice for all domains?
-----I've run a report for backlinks. If my thought is true that there are some pointing to www.www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com and some to the www.MY-CUSTOMER-SITE.com, is there any value in addressing this?0 -
302 Redirect of www. version of a site - Pros/Cons
Hi, I am considering making the 301 redirect from the domain to a 302 temporary redirect. Currently if a user lands on "www" version of the site, they are redirected to the non "www" version. But after the redirect, they will land on an external webpage (so if a user lands on the "www" version, they are redirected to a different website, not related to my domain). Reason I'm considering this is because I have received a large number of spammy backlinks on the "www" version of the site (negative seo). So I'm hoping that the temporary redirect will help me recover. Your thoughts on this: 1. Is this the best way to do a 302 redirect (redirecting the www version to an external domain)? 2. Will the redirect help the main domain recover, considering all spammy backlinks are pointing to the www version? 3. What are the pros/cons, if any? Thanks in advance for your thoughts! Howard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howardd0 -
Magento Base Install 302 from non www to www , problems?
Using our crawl diagnostics report I am seeing a 302 redirect (temporary) from mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com. It is on an installation of magento with no modifications to the htaccess. This seems problematic, should I change to a 301 in .htaccess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Punkaj0 -
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 -
Root domain or sub domain? WWW. or NOT WWW......
I am a little confused! I use vidahost whom I have to say I find very helpful. I currently have the domains www.fentonit.co.uk and www.fentonit.com, now the websites was set up using the www.fentonit.com and I have www.fentonit.co.uk as a parked domain pointed to the www.fentonit.com. Confused yet? Now because I wanted the website to show www.fentonit.co.uk I added some code I was given by the guys to the .hta access file and viola up it comes as the .co.uk which is what I wanted. So if your still here and havent A: Killed yourself yet or B: Went to the Pub Then my questions are: 1. Is there going to be an issue from an SEO point of view having my site set up this way and if so how do I resolve it? 2. Would I be better using the root domain fentonit.co.uk (I think this is the root domain, although it iscurrently parked and pointed) as opposed to the sub www domain?.......and finally.......? 3. If it is set up as I stated what exactly would be my root domain, would it be the .co.uk or the .com? Sorry and I completely understand if your not interested in answering it but if you do.....Thanks in advance and I'll take you to the pub...lol Craig www.fentonit.co.uk ( i think)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigyboy1 -
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
