Dropping the www
-
We are planning on changing our domain next week. Everything has been covered including google change of domain procedure and redirects etc.
I plan on dropping the www during this move as it is redundant and dilutes the keyword density of the domain.
What do you guys think of this? Is it worth doing?
Thanks,
Gareth
-
We have made the change!
http://burfieldcreative.co.uk/
We have put the redirects in place and carried out the domain change procedure with google. If anybody can check everything is in order that would be most appreciated.
Thanks for all your advice.
-
Thanks for the response. Yes the reason is that the company has grown and already rebranded to burfieldcreative. We need to make this switch one day...
There will be a like for like relationship on the urls and we have hired a .htaccess expert to implement the redirects.
We are carrying out the full domain change procedure in Google webmaster tools.
Please see my previous thread here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/change-of-domain-procedure
We are carrying this out today but I am still unsure if I want to put my neck on the line!
-
As to question one, I believe it is force of habit. That is how they always did it.
As to question 2, Your issue with Burfieldcreative is that you have it 301'd to the JamesBurfield.co.uk. By virtue of that it has no links and will not have any links. Both the www and the non www of burfieldcreative.co.uk are 301'd to the old site. There is no value in either of the new domains at this moment. If they had a link, they would be passing the juice to the old site due to the 301's.
I think you are putting too much into BurfieldCreative vs JamesBurfield issue. If, your issue is you are already branded as Burfield Creative or you are going to put a lot of time, money, and other resources into BurfieldCreative being your brand, then you should stop and do this: Set the www.JamesBurfield.co.uk and the non www of same to 301to the new URL TO URL in the .htaccess file. If you do this any other way you are going to lose something that is hard to regain. You must be clear as to what you are doing. Do not proceed until you are. Once you switch, you are going to lose some of your links and some of your authority (up to ten percent). Be sure that is where you want to go. Remember you can put BurfieldCreative.co.uk all over and few will realize they landed on JamesBurfield. So, be sure it is a necessary change.
You are a web design firm and you are doing well with domain and page Authority. If you screw this up you are going to hate yourself and it will take a lot of ale/beer/wine/whiskey, etc. to make you not feel it. Trust me PLEASE.
Everything in my body is saying leave it as you have it and set the preferred as explained before. But, there are other mozzers who might interject here.
Best
-
Thanks for the response.
1. 60% use www. because:
a. There name server sets it up for them automatically
b. They think that is the only option
c. Don't realise that you maybe reducing diluting the keyword % of the domain name (A metric that is obviously considered by search engines)
2. Surely those numbers are mainly for www.jamesburfield.co.uk and not www.burfieldcreative.co.uk? It is hard to separate the back link numbers due to the new redirecting to the old. As we are doing a redirect anyway why not go to the non www?
The screen shots are great (thanks) but the tests we really need to do are:
As then we can compare the weightiness of the 2 options and see which is best.
What do you think?
-
As to question 1, doesn't matter. As I see it most (about 60%) still use www, but since it resolves to the one selected it doesn't matter.
I am attaching images using the jamesburfield.co.uk. As it is now, your new url is 301'd to that anyway. Using OSE you will see that your www had a LOT more links. By doing a 301 to the non you would be losing some significant juice even though it is somewhere between less than 1 percent and 10 percent. (I advocate for 301's due to the small loss all the time; with yours, there is too much to lose by going with non www IMHO).
You have 4 linking root domains in the non and 165 in the www. Since no matter what someone puts they will end up on the www if you set the 301 to it and make it preferred in GWMT, you should do all to resolve to www as preferred domain. See images below.
-
Hi Robert,
Thanks for the reply. The old domain is http://www.jamesburfield.co.uk and the new domain is http://www.burfieldcreative.co.uk.
This new domain has been 'played around with' previously but it's pretty much a fresh start I think (worth checking though!). Therefore I thought we might as well get off to the best possible start and that would involve (I think) dropping the www.
So now I have 2 questions if I may...
- Theoretically if this was a brand new domain with no history is it better to set the non www as the preferred? Of course we would redirect the alternative.
- How can I find out which version is juiciest as the new domain is on the google radar, I want to choose the most prominent version.
Thanks for your detailed reply.
Gareth
-
Gareth
Without knowing your domain it is a bit of a more difficult question. Assuming you have not already selected non www as preferred domain in GWMT and done a 301 redirect in .htaccess file already, you need to consider this: If you www has the preponderance of links coming to it, when you make they change you will be giving up a larger amount of juice than if you did it from the other. But, in any case you need a preferred domain and you need to choose one or the other. If you choose www. even if someone puts the non www in it will resolve to the www. So, I would do it based on which had the least link value and make that one link to the one with the most. Then in GWMT select the one with the most link value as preferred.
Best
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
-
I am trying to better understand solving the duplicate content issues highlighted in your recent crawl report of our site - www.thehomesites.com.
Below are some of the urls highlighted as having duplicate content -
On-Page Optimization | | urahul
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/76105
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/44135
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/75227
http://www.thehomesites.com/zip_details/94501 These are neighborhood reports generated for 4 different zip codes. We use a standard template to create these reports. What are some of the steps we can take to avoid these pages being categorized as duplicate content?0 -
Should I remove 'local' landing pages? Could these be the cause of traffic drop (duplicate content)?
I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords. I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them. I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic. My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Dropping Old Site After Too Many Penalties. What Do You Think About the New One?
I finally decided to drop my website after it kept losing traffic even though I spent hundreds of hours and lots of $$$ trying to recover from both Panda and Penguin. I should've started a new website a lot earlier. So here's my new website, let me know if it's worthy of Big G: http://www.webhostinghero.com/ Thank you in advance for your constructive comments!
On-Page Optimization | | sbrault740 -
Number of pages crawled in dropping from 4 to 2
The report on our campaign shows that up to 2 pages are being crawled now from 4. However, our site has more pages than this. We recently inserted code to allow crawlers. what can we do to resolve this? please assist.v
On-Page Optimization | | seoworx1230 -
Should I use www in my url when running On-Page Report Card?
When creating a On-Page Report Card I get 2 different results when using a WWW and without for my url. What is best?
On-Page Optimization | | thomas.wittine0 -
Can Anyone Explain Ranking Drop?!?
Good Morning, I'm hoping someone out there can try and help me figure out what has caused my site to drop from #6 to #10 to #14 and now #19 for my main keyword.. ( My Site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e ) I am convinced that my site has the best/most unique content in this niche. Every other site uses the same manufacturer descriptions and info and i have added text to certain pages to try and give them more unique content. I believe that my site is very easy to use and navigate, and should be considered a great user experience... Any guidance or help would be greatly appreciated.... Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850 -
We dropped from a page rank of 4 to 3
We dropped from a page rank of 4 to 3 because of the Google Freshness update. Are there any insights anyone can give me? Our site is www.totalvac.com
On-Page Optimization | | totalvac0 -
On my site, www.myagingfolks.com, only a small number of my pages appear to be indexed by google or yahoo. Is that due to not having an XML sitemap, keywords, or some other problem?
On my site, www.myagingfolks.com, only a small number of my pages appear to be indexed by google or yahoo. I have thousands of pages! Is that due to not having an XML sitemap, keywords, or some other problem?
On-Page Optimization | | Jordanrg0