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
-
CNAME record for WWW to Non-WWW Vs. 301?
I was just chatting with the person who set up our site on our domain hosting and they said they added in a CNAME record to transfer the www version of my site to the Non-www version. Shouldn't this be set up as a 301 redirect? I have hundreds of links built to the www version and only a few to the non-www version. Or Could I just add in a 301 in addition to the CNAME record? This is not my wheelhouse and need a little advice. Thanks in Advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
I have an authority site with 90K visits per month. Now I have to change from non www to www. Will incur in any SEO issues while doing that? Could you please advice me on the best steps to follow to do this? Thank you very much!
Because I want to increase site speed, Siteground (my hosting) suggested I use Cloudflare Plus which needs my site to have www in order to work. I'm also using a cloud hosting. Im a bit scared of doing this, and thus decided to come to the community. I used MOZ for over 6 months now and love the tool. Please help me make the best possible decisions and what steps to follow. It would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_IT0 -
Removing www from printed and digital
I wanted to make sure there will be no negative SEO implications if we change all ‘www.fdmgroup.com' references (printed and digital)?After some Googling, apparently some search engines regard www.fdmgroup.com and fdmgroup.com as two different websites and split SEO rankings (quote me if i’m wrong!).To date, a lot (if not all) of our online presence (e.g. adverts, banner links etc) use www.fdmgroup.com (both visually and in HTML markup) so these would also need updating to remove the 'www'.What are your thoughts? For the sake of SEO and canonical/duplicate content/ranking issues etc, would changing all www.fdmgroup.com references have a negative effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fdmgroup0 -
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 -
Our website www.turbocupones.com dropped drastically in ranking today
Our website www.turbocupones.com dropped drastically in ranking today. I have no idea why this happened as we have not outsourced any SEO and sticked to google´s guidelines. Can you please check the web and give me Ideas why this happened? Our traffic dropped by 1000%. All our content is unique. I have years of experience in SEO and never had a problem like this. The rankings dropped drastically for everything. As said all SEO done is white hat. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch0 -
Redirect non www. domain to WWW. domain for established website?
Hey guys, The website in question has been online for more than 5 years but there are still 2 versions of the website. Both versions are indexed by Google and of course, this will result in duplicate content. Is it necessary to redirect the non-www domain to the www. domain. What are the cons and advantages? Will a lot of organic traffic be lost at first (if non-www are getting a good amount of traffic)? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing. Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing under same keywords " parts washers" Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhart0
