Identifying a 301-redirect problem?
-
I was looking at the Search Engine Optimization reports for one of my clients in Google Analytics, and I saw that their two biggest landing pages are www.website.com and http://website.com. Does this mean that Google is serving both the 'www' and 'non-www' versions of the website, and thus harming the website's overall ranking?
Thanks for any input!
-
I don't know exactly how many but usually links are built to the focused URL the owner 'thought' was the primary URL, thus giving the other URL less links.
I would suggest picking the link that has the most inbound links just in case you lose any rankings for losing out juice for those that are pointing to the opposite.
But as you mentioned if it is about the same and it is nothing substantial you can go with your opinion.
-
This is probably a dumb question, but how big of a deal is it to pick the URL version that has the most inbound links? If a client has already accidentally picked the URL that does NOT have the most inbound links, would you recommend going through the process of re-doing it so that the preferred URL is the one that has the most links? We are not talking about a huge difference overall, and neither domain has a huge number of links yet, so I'm wondering if it's worth the effort of going back...
-
Thank you! Very helpful.
-
Yes, this means either they have inbound links referring to the http://website.com and http://www.website.com.
This happens all the time especially if you don't have a redirect in place.
I suggest going into your WMT and choosing preferred http://www.website.com or whichever has the most links. Then you want to make sure your .htaccess redirects to your preferred URL.
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
-
Is 301 redirects a deal breaker for Migrating content or moving to new software?
I have this forum with about 2 million posts for 16 years on root of the domain. I am looking to switch softwares but the top ones won’t help setup 301 redirects. But I can still migrate all my members and all my content (threads/posts), would Google still reindex all our content or if we don’t setup redirects would it really kill our entire traffic for a long time or maybe just a month or so? I really want to migrate to software that isn’t forum based but rather something that offers courses, chat, live video streaming, subscription based etc. and this is the only way to do so OR to set it up on an entirely new domain OR subdomain but to me that is like starting all over from scratch? I could archive the forum to read only and set it up on subdomain or another root domain - then on the archived forum setup banners and a pop up linking to the new site or new subdomain? . This is such a hard decision for us as the current forum we have had for so many years has lost members posting from 1k a day to just a handful a day, our fb group though gets 1k a day so I’m trying to revive a site into something more modern and has all the training features we can offer as well.
Technical SEO | | vbsk1 -
301 Redirect for multiple links
I just relaunched my website and changed a permalink structure for several pages where only a subdirectory name changed. What 301 Redirect code do I use to redirect the following? I have dozens of these where I need to change just the directory name from "urban-living" to "urban", and want it to catch the following all in one redirect command. Here is an example of the structure that needs to change. Old
Technical SEO | | shawnbeaird
domain.com/urban-living (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe/the-vale (single page w/ content) New
domain.com/urban
domain.com/urban/tempe
domain.com/urban/tempe/the-vale0 -
301 Redirect Question
I am working with a website and I ran a Screaming Frog and noticed there are 4,600 301's on the website (www.srishoes.com). It seems like the issue is between the www. and without it and they aren't working together. Is this something that the website provider should update and what type of impact might this have on the site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ReunionMarketing
Matt0 -
Added 301 redirects, pages still earning duplicate content warning
We recently added a number of 301 redirects for duplicate content pages, but even with this addition they are still showing up as duplicate content. Am I missing something here? Or is this a duplicate content warning I should ignore?
Technical SEO | | cglife0 -
I have an eCommerce store with a lot of 301 redirects. Would that hurt my rankings?
I use BigCommerce, and they have a system where all the URLs are dynamically generated from the name of each product. So if I named a product "widget x y z" the url would be /widget-x-y-z/, and if I changed that to "blue widget x y z", it would change to /blue-widget-x-y-z/ and automatically redirect the old one to the new one. As a result, in 6 months, because of a lot of tweaking and experimenting, I've ended up with a hefty list of 400 redirects. Some of them are very old, and some are recent. So my question is in two parts: a) does having all of these redirects hurt my rankings? b) if so, would deleting them help?
Technical SEO | | shabbirun0 -
Moving articles to new site, can't 301 redirect because of panda
I have a site that is high quality, but was hit by penguin and perhaps panda. I want to remove some of the articles from my old site and put them on my new site. I know I can't 301 redirect them because I will be passing on the bad google vibes. So instead, I was thinking of redirecting the old articles to a page on the old site which explains that the article is moved over to the new site. I assume that's okay? I'm wondering how long I should wait between the time I take them down from the old site to the time I repost them on the new site. Do I need to wait for Google to de-index them in order to not be considered duplicate content/syndication? We'll probably reword them a bit, too - we really want to avoid panda. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | philray
Phil0 -
Help needed please with 301 redirects in htaccess file.
In summary, we're currently having issues with our htaccess file. 301 redirects are going through to the new described URL but in addition the new URL is followed by a ? and the old URL. How can we get rid of the ? and previous URL so they don't appear as an ending. None of the examples we've found re this issue online appear to work. Can anyone please offer some advice? Can we use a RewriteRule to stop this happening? Here's a summary of the htaccess file REDIRECT CODE BEGINS HERE LONG LIST OF REDIRECTS, which appear to be set up perfectly fine. REDIRECT CODE ENDS DirectoryIndex index.php <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks
Technical SEO | | petersommertravels
DirectoryIndex index.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond $1 !^(images|system|themes|pdf|favicon.ico|robots.txt|index.php) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.htaccess$ - [F]
RewriteRule ^favicon.ico - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]</ifmodule> DirectoryIndex index.php0 -
301 Single Page Redirects in IIS7?
Hey all -- I am working with a client, getting ready to make a full domain level change to a brand new domain. The existing domain has solid domain importance and trust, and the home page has a 5/10 GPR, so the transfer of all existing link juice is very important. Of course, I will be utilizing 301's to permanently redirect all existing pages to their new permanent homes. It will be a 1-1 structure, which I know is also best when possible. My question comes in specific to IIS. There is a wealth of information out there on the net regarding implementing permanent 301's using Apache and .htaccess, but nada when it comes to doing it in IIS7, which is what the client is using. For instance, today I am seeking to help them redirect 2 single pages to new destinations within the same domain, just diffferent folders. When you open up the IIS7 Control Panel (yes, with full Admin access), you can navigate to the directory, but the individual pages that I am looking to redirect with 301's do not show in IIS7, so you can't just right click on each page and choose "A redirection to a URL," etc. Any help on exactly how to redirect a single page using a permanent 301 in IIS 7 would be huge! Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0