New website, to www or not
-
I was just wondering if there are any advantages to using the www instead of just the domain name for seo.
Can these be elaborated on?
-
There was a time when we had domain names, but there was no world wide web (am I old?). It only made sense when we added the world wide web that we gave a sub-domain (www) to our world wide web server, after all that was what we did with our gopher server. But everyone that says, choose your favorite, is correct. It will make no difference.
Note: I had email before I had a mouse.
-
I believe it's just personal preference these days. Some people are dropping the www and making the non-www the canonical version since it's four characters shorter, which can be helpful if you're active on Twitter and other character-restricted networks.
-
I have never liked www. it is a waste waste waste of time and effort.
Be sure to tell webmaster tools about your preferred version,
in Site Configuration -> Settings
-
www is old skool!
get rid!
-
I understand 301'ing from one to the other (whatever you choose to do) for seo reasons, but is there any real REASON to setup a site as a www in the first place these days??
-
Hi Simon, As you know that both http://www.example.com and http://example.com are seen by Google as two different sites.
Regardless of how you choose the website name i.e www or non www , we don't worry about the people,they will always find a way to visit both the www & non www versions of your site. It is impossible to handle both the cases. Inspite of this people will always find a way to visit both the www and the non-www versions of your site. It is imperative that you handle both cases.
As we know that www is a sub domain, so site without www can create duplicate content issues.
To solve this problem of duplicate content you had to add the site in Webmaster Tools and simply use the choose the preferred domain version: then redirect [301] the non-preferred version to the preferred one:
I hope that your query had been solved.
-
Hi Simon,
I usually do prefer the www. version, but I believe there no major difference between the two versions when you are building up a fresh website.
Still, it is important to underline the fact, that you need to choose one of the two versions and eliminate the other one be redirecting: www -> non-www or non-www. -> www.
This way you will eliminate many duplicates from the start (and you will help your link juice flow better).
I hope it was helpful,
Istvan
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
-
How to check if my website is penalized ?
Hi all, I just went over some post that my page can get penalized for over optimizing. I realized my page has quite a lot of h1 (6 it had 30) and a lot of "bold" keywords, does the bolding affect the page seo/penalizing the page? the page im talking about it palmislander.com/dumaguete-travel-guide Thanks
Technical SEO | | i3arty0 -
Why Are Some Pages On A New Domain Not Being Indexed?
Background: A company I am working with recently consolidated content from several existing domains into one new domain. Each of the old domains focused on a vertical and each had a number of product pages and a number of blog pages; these are now in directories on the new domain. For example, what was www.verticaldomainone.com/products/productname is now www.newdomain.com/verticalone/products/product name and the blog posts have moved from www.verticaldomaintwo.com/blog/blogpost to www.newdomain.com/verticaltwo/blog/blogpost. Many of those pages used to rank in the SERPs but they now do not. Investigation so far: Looking at Search Console's crawl stats most of the product pages and blog posts do not appear to be being indexed. This is confirmed by using the site: search modifier, which only returns a couple of products and a couple of blog posts in each vertical. Those pages are not the same as the pages with backlinks pointing directly at them. I've investigated the obvious points without success so far: There are a couple of issues with 301s that I am working with them to rectify but I have checked all pages on the old site and most redirects are in place and working There is currently no HTML or XML sitemap for the new site (this will be put in place soon) but I don't think this is an issue since a few products are being indexed and appearing in SERPs Search Console is returning no crawl errors, manual penalties, or anything else adverse Every product page is linked to from the /course page for the relevant vertical through a followed link. None of the pages have a noindex tag on them and the robots.txt allows all crawlers to access all pages One thing to note is that the site is build using react.js, so all content is within app.js. However this does not appear to affect pages higher up the navigation trees like the /vertical/products pages or the home page. So the question is: "Why might product and blog pages not be indexed on the new domain when they were previously and what can I do about it?"
Technical SEO | | BenjaminMorel0 -
How do I optimize a website for SEO for a client that is using a subdirectory as a seperate website?
We launched a subdirectory site about two months ago for our client. What's happening is searches for the topic covered by the subdirectory are yielding search results for the old site and not the new site. We'd like to change this. Are there best practices for the subdirectory site Specifically we're looking for things we can do using sitemapping and Webmaster tools. Are there other technical things we can do? Thanks you.
Technical SEO | | IVSeoTeam120 -
Link building to ROOT domain OR to WWW.?
Hello, Here I come with one more 'sensitive' question, hoping that you SEO gurus could give some input on. My title explains pretty much what I'm wondering about, but let me give you some short data. I have from .htaccess file set that all traffic goes to WWW.mydomain.com. I know that it is 'better' for search engines not to have duplicate destinations as that can give decreased page rank because of 'double content'. As for search engines http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com is totally different domains. Now wondering one thing: If I build a several thousands of backlinks at various sources, blogs, directories, web sites etc etc. - shall I link to domain ROOT or shall I include WWW prefix? When looking at Moz Keyword Analysis for my domains, I can see a block about 'Linking Root Domains' and 'Page Linking Root Domains'. But no 'www' variable (sub-domain) there. As I have already set canonical part so everything shows with WWW on my website - what logic shall I use when building backlinks? How will search engine translate the link juice in regards I wrote above? Thanks in advance, great forum!
Technical SEO | | SEOisSEO0 -
Development Website Duplicate Content Issue
Hi, We launched a client's website around 7th January 2013 (http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk), we originally constructed the website on a development domain (http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk) which was active for around 6-8 months (the dev site was unblocked from search engines for the first 3-4 months, but then blocked again) before we migrated dev --> live. In late Jan 2013 changed the robots.txt file to allow search engines to index the website. A week later I accidentally logged into the DEV website and also changed the robots.txt file to allow the search engines to index it. This obviously caused a duplicate content issue as both sites were identical. I realised what I had done a couple of days later and blocked the dev site from the search engines with the robots.txt file. Most of the pages from the dev site had been de-indexed from Google apart from 3, the home page (dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk, and two blog pages). The live site has 184 pages indexed in Google. So I thought the last 3 dev pages would disappear after a few weeks. I checked back late February and the 3 dev site pages were still indexed in Google. I decided to 301 redirect the dev site to the live site to tell Google to rank the live site and to ignore the dev site content. I also checked the robots.txt file on the dev site and this was blocking search engines too. But still the dev site is being found in Google wherever the live site should be found. When I do find the dev site in Google it displays this; Roller Banners Cheap » admin <cite>dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/</cite><a id="srsl_0" class="pplsrsla" tabindex="0" data-ved="0CEQQ5hkwAA" data-url="http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/" data-title="Roller Banners Cheap » admin" data-sli="srsl_0" data-ci="srslc_0" data-vli="srslcl_0" data-slg="webres"></a>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.This is really affecting our clients SEO plan and we can't seem to remove the dev site or rank the live site in Google.Please can anyone help?
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Www to non www
Hi, Is this the correct code for redirecting www to non www version on Apache server RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Should I use www. or not in my main URL?
I have backlinks coming into my homepage, which has both a www. URL and one that's merely http://mysite.com. Which is the preferred URL for best optimization for search engines and how do I find this out?
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0 -
New Sub-domains or New Directories for 10+ Year Domain?
We've got a one-page, 10+ year old domain that has a 65/100 domain authority that gets about 10k page views a day (I'm happy to share the URL but didn't know if that's permitted). The content changes daily (it's a daily bible verse) so most of this question is focused on domain authority, not the content. We're getting ready to provide translations of that daily content in 4 languages. Would it be better to create sub-domains for those translations (same content, different language) or sub-folders? Example: http://cn.example.com
Technical SEO | | ipllc
http://es.example.com
http://ru.example.com or http://example.com/cn
http://example.com/es
http://example.com/ru We're able to do either but want to pick the one that would give the translated version the most authority both now and moving forward. (We definitely don't want to penalize the root domain.) Thanks in advance for your input.0