Www or not www base url
-
Here is the situation. Developer custom coded a magento commerce shop for a seo client and is having problems adding www to the URL without breaking the site. They wont be able to get this completed until a couple months down the road.
We are starting monthly SEO this June. Most directories and websites link to the www version of a site not the non www. What should I expect since we are ranking for the non-www and linking to the www version.
In web master tools i'm telling google to display the URL as www.
-
The 2 month wait is nonsense. I agree.
I appreciate everyones feedback. We are going to push for the www version, the non-www option is a no go,
Thanks : ]
-
"It doesn't sound like they are a developer at all if" no kidding! I'm not a developer, yet as a project manager even I knew it would be that straight forward...
-
It doesn't sound like they are a developer at all if they can't apply a basic rewrite which is included in the Magento core.
Switch URL rewriting on from the admin panel and add this in .htaccess
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,NC](replacing yourdomain.com with the domain).
May vary depending on the version of Magento although if its a new build, I would expect it to be 1.6 or 1.7.
-
I can't think of a reason why a properly coded Magneto site could not have www added to the urls in a very short manner of time. Like an hour or less..
If you're only on the SEO end of it, you probably already know piling on issues with linking to redirecting url's isn't the best use of your time. I think the decision has to be made by the client. You just need to make clear the anticipated results of each option. Ideally, you'd recommend to your client to fix the URL problem first, and let them know that a 2 month wait for a little fix like an .htaccess re-write is not standard for web developers.
-
ouch. If I understand what you just communicated, you've got a site that had previously worked with the www version, but now, due to technical changes, the www version doesn't function? And won't for a couple months?
That's a scary scenario and having worked with many different developers and systems administrators over many years, I've never allowed one to tell me "we can't fix that for a couple months" and get away with that claim.
It can either be addressed or it can't at the site level or the server level, one way or another. Regardless of development framework, you should be able to set the non-www to redirect to the www version at the server level and it should work right. If there's a massive bug in the Magento implementation, that sounds like a very serious flaw in the developer's skill set as far as I can tell.
So - IF you're stuck, you're going to have a major SEO problem for longer than a couple months.
By all rights the only solution in that scenario is to scrap the www version altogether and NOT revert back to it in a couple months. Change all the 301 redirect settings and within GWT to now point to the non www version. Then work to build up more links to the non www version over time.
Because that's the only short-term solution you can do now from a best practices approach if the failure can't be quickly addressed.
And down the road, if you do this, you'd have to once again reverse everything, just causing you more problems.
So either get a developer / IT specialist who can fix it immediately, or scrap the www version altogether.
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
-
Dynamic Url best approach
Hi We are currently in the process of making changes to our travel site where by if someone does a search this information can be stored and also if the user needs to can take the URL and paste into their browser at find that search again. The url will be dynamic for every search, so in order to stop duplicate content I wanted ask what would be the best approach to create the URLS. ** An example of the URL is: ** package-search/holidays/hotelFilters/?depart=LGW&arrival=BJV&sdate=20150812&edate=20150819&adult=2&child=0&infant=0&fsearch=first&directf=false&nights=7&tsdate=&rooms=1&r1a=2&r1c=0&r1i=0&&dest=3&desid=1&rating=&htype=all&btype=all&filter=no&page=1 I wanted to know if people have previous experience in something like this and what would be the best option for SEO. Will we need to create the URL with a # ( As i read this stops google crawling after the #) Block the folder IN ROBOTS is there any other areas I should be aware of in order stop any duplicate content and 404 pages once the URL/HOLIDAY SEARCH is no longer valid. thanks E
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
SSL, www issue. Should we buy WWW license or just add redirect from www to non-www site?
Hi, We've installed SSL certificate (Symantec Safe Site).
Technical SEO | | Ryan_V
Now our site shows with https, but when someone types www before site name it leads to http and shows strikethrough https unsafe icon in the browser. As it appears, our SSL was purchased without www domain name license. Should we buy www license or just add redirect from www to without www site? If so how to set up this redirect properly. Thanks.0 -
Special characters in URL
Will registered trademark symbol within a URL be bad? I know some special characters are unsafe (#, >, etc.) but can not find anything that mentions registered trademark. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0 -
Why are URLs like www.site.com/#something being indexed?
So, everything after a hash (#) is not supposed to be crawled and indexed. Has that changed? I see a clients site with all sorts of URLs indexed like ... http://www.website.com/#!category/c11f For the above URL, I thought it was the same as simply http://www.website.com/. But they aren't, they're getting indexed and all the content on the pages with these hash tags are getting crawled as well. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | wiredseo0 -
Webmaster tools...URL Errors
Hi mozzers, Quick question. Whats the best thing to do about URL errors in webmaster tools. They are all 404s that point from external sites. Many of them are junk spam sites. Should I mark them as "fixed" or just leave them. I'm hoping google is aware it's out of my control if spam sites want to link to 404s on my site. Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
How to keep a URL social equity during a URL structure/name change?
We are in the process of making significant URL name/structure change to one of our property and we want to keep the social equity (likes, share, +1, tweets) from the old to the new URL. We have been trying many different option without success. We are running our social "button" in an iframe. Thanks
Technical SEO | | OlivierChateau0 -
Regarding Canonical Url
We have a e-commerce website. Our own homegrown:-) We recently visited Google Webmaster tools and could see that Google mention we have double Meta tags for some main and subcategories. Each Product Category on our site have a subcategory/ Sub url - "Bestseller", "On Sale", "just arrived". The sub url is not a really a real category and we can therefore not make totally unique description and title for does urls. domain.com/category domain.com/category/bestseller
Technical SEO | | areygie
domain.com/category/on-sale
domain.com/category/just-arrived We are thinking about 2 solutions. 1. Canonical Url on subcategory pointing to main category.
2. Or add a word bestseller, on sale or just arrived in front of the meta title/description. We can do this from code. I personally opt for option 1. But I am little unsure what is the best way to go. Thanks in advance for your advice0 -
Advice on strange URL problem
I'm considering doing some pro bono work for a local non-profit and upon initial review they have a number of serious issues but there is one in particular I'd like to check my thinking on. The developer who set up the site some years ago implemented a javascript redirect on their root domain so that it redirects to: http://domain.com/wordpress This is wrong for all kinds of reasons and I want to recommend eliminating this redirect and getting rid of the 'wordpress' part of the path altogether. However, the site is quite established with good PR and they would take a hit by changing the path. I'd do 301 redirects to the new URLs that would not have 'wordpress' in the path in addition to other remediation. My question - is my thinking here good? It's worth it, right? The other option is just get rid of the weird redirect and keep 'wordpress' in the path but this seems unacceptable to me. Any opinions?
Technical SEO | | friendlymachine0