Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?

[EcommerceSite]

Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?

[EcommerceSite]

That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank You.

[ThompsonPaul]

Sorry, Niners, I wasn't clear you were talking about two different spellings of the domain as well as the www and non www versions. I had assumed that was just a typo. Sorry 'bout that.

So... if you own iamcool.com and i-am-cool-com, you essentially have four variations for the domain URL you need to address. The Search Engines consider each of these to be different sites:

• www.i-am-cool-com
• i-am-cool.com
• www.iamcool.com
• iamcool.com

Out of all of these, you're going to pick the one that is your primary site address. This will become what's known as your FQDN - Fully Qualified Domain Name. This will be the URL you use for EVERYTHING you control. All links will use this full version, it's what you'll put on business cards, in bio links on guest posts, everything.

Since you say that the version with the hyphens has been in existence the longest, I would recommend that become your primary. And further, I suspect that the www version of it probably has the most incoming links.

So,,, www.i-am-cool.com will become your primary site address - your FQDN. (Assuming you agree with what's stated above.)

Once that's decided, you now need to 301-redirect each of the other versions directly to that www.i-am-cool.com URL. (For example, you specifically want to avoid a situation where iamcoolcom redirects to www.iamcool,com, which then redirects again to the final www.i-am-cool.com.)

Once you've done the redirects, you'll want to keep a close eye on your Webmaster Tools and Analytics to make sure you're not getting 404s from pages not being caught by the redirects correctly. In addition, you can use the hostnames report in Analytics to make sure that only your FQDN is showing up, indicating all the other versions are redirecting correctly.

Hope that clears things up a little more.

Paul

[irvingw]

definitely keep it then!

[EcommerceSite]

Changing it to a 301 makes sense. Do I need to change for both with the www and without? I have never quite figured out if that counts as two different urls or not.

[EcommerceSite]

The only reason we still use the one with the hyphens is because we have been using the same domain name for over ten years.

[ThompsonPaul]

You definitely need to change the 302 to a 301 redirect, Niners. Typically, you check which version has the most incoming links already (since it's an existing site) and make that the primary address. Then you use the 301 redirect to point the other URL to the primary one.

Even though many people may directly type in the URL without the www, most people who are writing it as a link on a webpage will do it including the www. Having those incoming links avoid needing a redirect is more important than the folks typing in direct (since even 301s don't pass absolutely all the link authority.)

Make sense?

Paul

[irvingw]

302 redirects do not pass PR so you need to 301 the site instead, if there is PR on that site. if not you can just point that domain at the DNS level and it will resolve.

but i would think the version without the hyphens is more desirable. why isn't that your main domain name? obviously you own both domains. people only use the hyphens when the domain name they want is already taken.