How can I tell which website pages are hosted on the root domain vs the www subdomain?
-
One of the SEOmoz help desk professionals told me this today regarding some of my website pages.
"it looks like you have pages hosted as separate pages on both the root domain and the www subdomain, which means that these pages are competing for rankings and authority. You may want to consider a 301 redirect or the use of rel=canonical tags.".
Can anyone help me understand this? How can I tell which pages are which?
-
Thanks Dr. Meyers. I did a 301 redirect for everything to go to www. Hopefully that fixes it. Thank You!
-
Thanks Dr. Meyers. I did a 301 redirect for everything to go to www. Hopefully that fixes it. Thank You!
-
Did something change recently? I'm currently seeing your non-www pages 301-redirect to the "www." version, at least in a handful of cases. There are a couple of oddities where a page double-301s, but that looks isolated. I'm not seeing any clear signs of a problem.
You don't need both canonicals and 301s for this particular issue, although a canonical tag can still have value on other parts of the site (including the home-page).
-
Yes I would do both. If your goal is to standardize to either www or non-www, then redirect to one or the other. This will assure new backlinks go to the desired version. The canoicalization should standardize the link power on Google's end.
-
Thanks Andrew. Would you recommend doing 301 redirects as well as canonical tags?
-
Chances are they aren't separate pages. canonical tags are what you want to use. They essentially combine different ways of getting to your pages into 1 indexable page. So
all point to the same page, but if you put in the section, no matter how the crawler got there, it should consider the page www.example.com, which means you wont have the competing pages issue.
-
Hi Nakul,
Thank you for that. According to SEOmoz definition of a subdomain......the only subdomain I have would be WWW
She also told me this.
I can tell that you have two separate pages set up for the subdomain and the root domain because when I go to http://www.austintenantadvisors.com/ and http://austintenantadvisors.com/, both pages are live URLs that don't redirect from one to the either and neither page has a canonical tag in the source code. In fact, it looks like all of the pages on your site live on both the www subdomain and also the root domain separately. You should look into fixing this issue before you decide how to set up the campaign because the way you choose to correct the issue will decide where the pages are actually hosted, which is how you choose how to base your campaign. For example, if you decide to have the www pages redirect to the non-www pages, you will want to set the campaign up as a root domain campaign or we won't crawl past the redirect. One thing to take in to consideration when redirecting these pages is to see which version is ranking in the search engines. Here is a good resource about redirecting pages on your site from Google Webmaster Tools
Can you recommend the best course of action?
1. Redirect www pages to the non-www pages OR
2.. Redirect non-www pages to www pages
-
Do a site:yourdomain.com and then do a site:subdomain.yourdomain.com and you should be able to find the pages you are referring to. Doing a site:www.yourdomain.com will only show pages from www presuming non www is set to correctly redirect to www and the preferred display URL is set in Google as the one with www. I hope this helps.
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
-
If I redirect a subdomain, does this affect the parent domain?
Hi I have a company for example: abc.com and they have a subdomain def.abc.com with a lot of errors. These errors i believe affect the parent domain abc.com. So my company would like to redirect the subdomain to another domain altogther ex: xyz.com Can i redirect the subdomain def.abc.com to another website domain? Would this affect the parent domain in a good or bad way? Or should i be using an external links to point to a new domain for the subdomain? Trying to think what's best for SEO and the parent domain. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crodriguez890 -
Why some websites can rank the keywords they don't have in the page?
Hello guys, Yesterday, I used SEMrush to search for the keyword "branding agency" to see the SERP. The Liquidagency ranks 5th on the first page. So I went to their homepage but saw no exact keywords "branding agency", even in the page source. Also, I didn't see "branding agency" as a top anchor text in the external links to the page (from the report of SEMrush). I am an SEO newbie, can someone explain this to me, please? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
Need references to a company that can transition our 1000 page website from Http to Https without breaking our SEO backlinks and site structure
Hi Ya'll I'm looking for a company or independent who can transition our website from http to https. I want to make sure they know what they're doing with a Wordpress website. More importantly, i want to make sure they don't break any seo juice from external sources while internally nothing gets broken. Anyone have any good recommendations? You can reply back or DM me. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Landing pages, are my pages competing?
If I have identified a keyword which generates income and when searched in google my homepage comes up ranked second, should I still create a landing page based on that keyword or will it compete with my homepage and cause it to rank lower?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Great_Projects0 -
Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site?
Hi, Can we retrieve all 404 pages of my site? is there any syntax i can use in Google search to list just pages that give 404? Tool/Site that can scan all pages in Google Index and give me this report. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Can you Canonical to a URL in a different folder under the same domain?
I want to know if it's possible to add a canonical tag to a URL that points to a URL under a different folder. Content is just about the same. Here's an example (fake urls and product, but structure and parameters are similar to my client's website): domain.com/toy-ducks-results.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis domain.com/toy-ducks-details.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis&style=Sparkly Let's say that my purple Elvis ducks are really popular. Is there any harm in putting a rel=canonical on the Sparkly Elvis ducks page to the purple Elvis ducks page? Even though they are two different folders? /toy-ducks-results and /toy-ducks-details So, in effect, the preferred folder is /toy-ducks-results Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE30 -
SEO - Product Related MiniSites: Hosting & Domains
Hey Mozzers, I would first like to thank everyone in advance for replying to my question 😉 Actually, my question is 2-part: Hosting & Domains 1) We are currently researching product-related domains and would like to build-out review style mini-sites on WordPress that link back to our main site product pages. We're using X-Cart platform and X-Cart offers a WordPress module. My Dev. recommends installing a main WordPress mini-site template on my server and replicating this template under different domains/unique content, obviously ;-). -My questions is; For backlink purposes, would it be better to host these WordPress pages in a different location/server? 2) Domains (which domain extensions are the best): I have read mixed reviews on this subject ... a) Do dashes (i,e. brand-model.com) have an impact as well?? I read a post regarding this; http://www.commonsensemarketing.net/do-domain-name-extensions-matter/ - and the general feeling was that .com and .net ranked higher, faster but that .info wasn't a bad runner up. I was a bit excited to hear that .info wasn't a bad choice as they are actually "available" and cheap as well (under 3 bucks) until a comment was posted about a "Market Samurai" study. They reported testing 4 domain names (below) with the same article, date & time post . 1. domainname.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | k9byron
2. domainname.org
3. domainname.net
4. domain-name.com -My question is: Can anyone give any advise on which domain extensions work better/rank higher faster? com / .net / .org / .info / ect? Also, is it better to have more product related keywords in the domain? Example, one of my products is the "Dogtra 280ncp Platinum". WordStream exact match tells me that "dogtra 280ncp" gets 210 searches per month and that "dogtra 280ncp platinum" gets another 91 searches per month. I'm guessing that its better to buy www.Dogtra280ncpPlatinum.com instead of www.Dogtra280ncp.com as we would pick up the searches for the "platinum" term as well? Question Summary: Is it better to host these mini-sites on another server than my main site? Which domain extensions work better? Is it better to use as many product related keywords in the domain as possible and maybe even throw modifiers in there as well such as "buy" or "review"? Thanks Again!
Byron-0