Redirecting non-www to www
-
Hi all,
I recently ran my first diagnostic test with SEOmoz and was alarmed to find my company's site has over 8,000 cases of duplicate content, virtually all of which can be attributed to separate domains, www vs. non-www.
So after some research I found that this can be solved easily using .htaccess. However I found a warning on another site that if my site has already been indexed by Google without the www, there could be side effects like a loss in PR.
Can anybody tell me how to find out whether my site falls into this category? I do have access to Google Webmaster tools but I can't find anywhere that tells me how my site's been indexed.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Ryan, you've received some great responses here. Did they answer your question?
-
You're absolutely right, Paul. Thanks. Sometimes I forget that people's domains are more broad than the ones I work with. (I'm permitted to be lazy in this regard, but should not encourage such laziness.)
Onward!
-
Agree w/ what Jesse's saying here, but need a little tidy on his description of how to look at how Google sees the addresses differently. You'll need to Google www.whoopsee.com and then whoopsie.com (note the .com needs to be included both times). Otherwise you're doing a keyword search, not a domain name search.
In fact, the best way to do these is to do a search for site:www.whoopsie.com and then site:whoopsie.com. That will limit the search results to actual URLs from only your own site.
Paul
-
If you want to see the true effect of this "split" you can use Open Site Explorer to check the incoming links of each version of the URL. If there's a major difference, pick the version with the most incoming links as your primary (or canonical) version. Then redirect the secondary version to that URL. Like Jesse, I almost always find the www version is the better one to make primary.
There's no reason not to do this redirecting, and every reason to do it. You may find the rankings fluctuate a little for a day or 2 as the search engines update themselves. But if you don't do this, you essentially have your two sites competing against each other and splitting their value between them. Which means other sites will outrank you even though their "score" is lower, because your score has been split.
Google Webmaster Tools can also tell you this info very effectively, but to get it you're going to have to create a second site inside your GWT account. When you set up your existing GWT site, you used either the www.example.com or non-www version of your website. Whichever address you chose, that is the ONLY index data provided in that GWT site.
As further proof search engines consider them separate sites, the only way to check the other version of your URL is to actually create a whole new site (in the same GWT account) using the other URL version as the setup address.
When on your main dashboard, you'll see a red button in the top right corner for **Add a Site. **Use the URL that's different from the one you used the first time. Then set up and verify as normal. You can use the same verification method you used the first time -most often just using your Google Analytics account to verify is easiest, but if you uploaded a special file or are using the header snippet, those will work again too.
Once you've got the second site set up, you will be able to compare the indexing and incoming links reports to see the differences between the two versions as Google sees them.
Last benefit of setting up both sites - you can now use the GWT tools Configuration -> Settings to tell Google which version of the site is your Preferred Domain. (you can only do this properly if you have both site versions set up) Set the same version of the preferred domain in both versions of the site and you'll give Google a second indicator for which version of your domain is the primary.
Hope that makes sense?
Paul
-
well you can find out how it's been indexed by typing in your domain. For example, if your domain is www.whoopsee.com then google "whoopsee" and see what it returns.
Regardless, this doesn't matter. What you NEED to do is simply do a redirect. Choose one, www or non-www. I prefer www but others prefer other things. It is not going to hurt you if you perform this redirect right this second, no matter what Google has indexed. If you do NOT perform the redirect... THAT is what will hurt your site.
So.. don't delay and don't worry! You will find that things will improve. Keep this in mind - performing a 301 redirect will pass link juice. Meaning if you point domain.com - www.domain.com then all previous links pointing to domain.com will pass juice to the new permanent redirected www.domain.com
Does this make sense?
Long story short - Your site will not be worsened by this redirect. It will be benefited. Because right now, Google sees them as two different sites and they are competing against eachother and link juice is split between them. Join like Voltron and move forward!
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
-
Redirect indexed lightbox URLs?
Hello all, So I'm doing some technical SEO work on a client website and wanted to crowdsource some thoughts and suggestions. Without giving away the website name, here is the situation: The website has a dedicated /resources/ page. The bulk of the Resources are industry definitions, all encapsulated in colored boxes. When you click on the box, the definition opens in a lightbox with its own unique URL (Ex: /resources/?resource=augmented-reality). The information for these colored lightbox definitions is pulled from a normal resources page (Ex: /resources/augmented-reality/). Both of these URLs are indexed, leading to a lot of duplicate indexed content. How would you approach this? **Things to Consider: ** -Website is built on Wordpress with a custom theme.
Technical SEO | | Alces
-I have no idea how to even find settings for the lightbox (will be asking the client today).
-Right now my thought is to simply disallow the lightbox URL in robots.txt and hope Google will stop crawling and eventually drop from the index.
-I've considered adding the main resource page canonical to the lightbox URL, but it appears to be dynamically created and thus there is no place to access (outside of the FTP, I imagine?). I'm most rusty with stuff like this, so figured I'd appeal to the masses for some assistance. Thanks! -Brad0 -
Rel=canonical and redirect on same page
Hi Guys, Am I going slightly mad but why would you want to have a redirect and a canonical redirecting back to the same page. For Instance https://handletrade.co.uk/pull-handles/pull-handles-zcs-range/d'-pull-handle-19mm-dia.-19-x-150mm-ss/?tag=Dia.&page=2 and in the source code:- <link href="<a class="attribute-value">https://handletrade.co.uk/d'-pull-handle-19mm-dia.-19-x-150mm-ss/</a>" rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" /> Perfect! exactly what it is intended to do. But then this page is 301 redirected tohttps://handletrade.co.uk/pull-handles/pull-handles-zcs-range/d'-pull-handle-19mm-dia.-19-x-150mm-ss/ The site is built in open cart and I think it's the SEO plugin that needs tweaking. Could this cause poor SERP visibility? This is happening across the whole site. Surely the canonical should just point to the proper page and then there is no need for an additional bounce.
Technical SEO | | nezona1 -
Missing 301 redirects
I just had a developer friend call me in a panic, because they had gone live with a new site and found out (the hard way) that they had missed some pages on their 301 redirects. So the pages are appearing in Google but serving 404s. Ouch! So their question was: other than running a report for 404 errors in something like Screaming Frog, is there a way to hunt down ONLY pages serving 404s, then export to CSV so they can be redirected? Anyone got any tricks up their sleeve?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Redirecting a blog
We've acquired another company and want to redirect their soon-to-be-obsolete website to ours. It includes a blog with many blog posts. Should we: only 301 redirect the top level blog URL
Technical SEO | | Caro-O
try redirect individual blogs to blogs of a similar topic on our site (least practical I'm sure)
redirect all their individual posts to our main blog URL Thanks, Caro1 -
302 redirected links not found
There are so many 302 redirected links you found among which most are for the pages which needs users to login to view the pages so redirection to login page is unavoidable. For example: https://www.stopwobble.com/wishlist/index/add/product/98199/form_key/QE0kEzOF2yO3DTtt/ Also we don't have product compare functionlity, but still there are so many links from compare page which redirects to respective category page. For exammple: http://www.stopwobble.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/98199/uenc/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zdG9wd29iYmxlLmNvbS93b2JibGUtd2VkZ2Vz/form_key/QE0kEzOF2yO3DTtt/ We need to know from where Moz crawler is detecting these links so that we can supress them from being crawled. I already tries to review overall site and confirmed these links nowhere exists in page source or in sitemap.xml
Technical SEO | | torbett0 -
After I 301 redirect duplicate pages to my rel=canonical page, do I need to add any tags or code to the non canonical pages?
I have many duplicate pages. Some pages have 2-3 duplicates. Most of which have Uppercase and Lowercase paths (generated by Microsoft IIS). Does this implementation of 301 and rel=canonical suffice? Or is there more I could do to optimize the passing of duplicate page link juice to the canonical. THANK YOU!
Technical SEO | | PFTools0 -
Redirection Plugin and Regular Expressions
I am using Wordpress and the Redirection plugin. I have recently launched a new site and while it was in development, a lot of broken pages were created and indexed. These are terminating in 404s. I am looking to redirect all traffic from: /replay/postname/ to the homepage. When I use this regular expression: Source: /replay/* Target: / it removes the /replay/ but leaves the postname. Any idea how I could redirect all traffic inside of /replay/ to the homepage? Thanks a bunch, Josh
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0 -
301 redirects
At the moment it's possible to access the home page of my website via two different urls, with and without www. and you've told me that this can be resolved with Canonicalization and a 301 redirect. Do I do this with my web hosting package or in my html pages? If I can't do it with my web host (1&1) then is there an idiot's guide of how to do it yourself? I've also got both the domain vamospaella.co.uk and vamospaella.com. Is it better to have one of these redirecting to the other for UK traffic (at the moment .co.uk redirects to .com) Thanks
Technical SEO | | melissa10