Hi, I am little bit confused in 301 redirect

[amarjitkapur]

Hi, I am little bit confused I have set my preferred domain to www but anyone can access my site via both www and non www domains, do I need to 301 redirect all non www to www or not , If yes then I want to know Why and If no then also I want to Why.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Amarjit,

If you set up the preferred domain in Google Webmaster, in reality that should be fine for most SEO purposes.

That said, it's still best practices to redirect visitors to one version or another. It's doubtful you'll see much SEO benefit from it, but it might make things easier from a consistancy point of view, and it's long been a regular practice of most SEOs.

You can read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Best of luck!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Mike,

Actually, I could be wrong, but I don't believe this is required. Google will ask during setup if you want to track subdomains, (and technically www is a subdomain) but I believe this is mostly for the benefit of how the data is displayed in the reports.

For www or non-www, Google will 'count' both as long as the tracking code is on the page. Depending on your analytics setup, you may or may not be able to determine if the visitor landed on a www page or not, but the page visit will register.

Does that make sense? I'm being very broad here, apologies for that.

[amarjitkapur]

Yes I got, Thanks

[Mike.Goracke]

You would need to setup Google Analytics with a www version and a non-www version to view traffic information. Same goes for managing your site, you need to setup both version in Google Webmaster Tools if you want to see data for both.

Google views the non-www version and the www version as two separate sites, that is why you need to set it up twice if that is the route you choose to take.

Does that answer your question?

Mike

[amarjitkapur]

Hi, Thanks to all of you. Actually I want to ask if I will not redirect than if someone is coming to my non www version that visit will be counted by google analytics ? or not

[PaddyDisplays]

When you  say "set my preferred domain to www" do you mean via webmaster tools?  if so google does not have control over your site, so of course there will be no forced redirect.

www.yourdomain.com is different from yourdomain.com, so you can pr can be split (if your backlinks are a mix of both).

should you do a force redirect for www, via htaccess?  yes, why? its good practice and easy to do.  also it will fix it for bing and other search engines

[Mike.Goracke]

Without additional information, I can only make a guess on your first comment, "I have set my preferred domain to www..." - are you talking about doing this is Google Webmaster Tools? If so, that is simply telling Google that you would prefer they index your www version versus your non-www version.

Depending on your CMS, you should be able to write some code to automatically redirect all non-www calls to your site to their www counterparts. If you are using IIS, you'd edit your web.config file. If you are using Apache, you'd edit your .htaccess file.

Does that make sense?

Mike

[Perfect007]

If you have set your preferred domain then its fine. It means you have already told Google about your preference.

If your website is old and you have made several backlinks on you non-preferred domain then link juice will not be transfer. It will be a better practice if you will do it also through 301 redirection.