Setup WordPress with www in General -> Settings to get benefits of old links or does it matter?
-
Hello,
I looked through many other Q&A and couldn't find this answer exactly... We build all of our client's sites on WordPress which automatically assign the new websites with no www. at the beginning. Recently one of our customers was upset because his new site (non-www) had only 3 links to it and his old www.domain.com site had 548. Is the simplest way to fix this to go into the WordPress Settings -> General and just change the WordPress Address and Site Address to the www version? Does it even matter or does WordPress tell Google to look at both versions. We don't see any SERP impact by having the non-www version up, but if it is an easy fix to get the 548 link credit I'll take it!
Reason I'm concerned is I do see the difference in OSE and would prefer to have 548 links vs. 3 also!
Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks community!
-
Hi,
I would change the Wordpress settings and setup a 301 redirect from non-www to www using htaccess (if you're using Apache, see e.g. http://enarion.net/web/htaccess/redirect-www-and-no-www/ for instructions how to do this). Updating the sitemaps file and resubmitting it to Google Webmasters, and manually fetching the www-version of the website with the Google crawler in the webmaster tools would be my next steps. Google and the other bots will use this signals to update their databases.
Best regards,
Tobias
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
-
How to build ( Linked domains )
I need help can someone tell me how to build Linked domains from pinterest.com,plus.google.com,facebook.com,twitter.com,linkedin.com to my website muller-designs.com all my competitors are ranking very well and have thousands of dollars of organic traffic and am not talking about the big fishes here are some examples mybarnwoodframes.com or www.framemymirror.com , this are one of my competitors, i have analize well all websites and the major difference we have are the Linked domains i have a couple of hundreds and they have thousands can someone help me anttel how can i create ( Linked domains ) o tell me what's going on with my website i spend a lot of money and time but just don't have good results i appreciate any tip of someone that already have ranked well a website THANK YOU
Algorithm Updates | | alexmuller870 -
Links hovering at the bottom of a search result
Hey folks, Curious has to the how and why there are links at the bottom of this search query for "Justin Bieber Networth" for other celebrities, completely unrelated i.e. "harry styles, taylor swift" etc. http://imgur.com/DNXuyRW (also attached) Is this an SEO tool? How did they embed this into a search query? Thanks! Screen Shot 2015-06-08 at 12.04.43 PM DNXuyRW
Algorithm Updates | | Anti-Alex0 -
Is there a we to get Google to index our site quicker?
I have updated some pages on a website, is there a way to get Google to index the page quicker?
Algorithm Updates | | webguru20140 -
Question About : Redirecting Old Pages to New & More Relevant Ones
I'm looking over a friends website, which used to have great natural ranking for some big keywords. Those ranking & CTR's have dropped a lot, so the next thing I checked into was top selling Brand & Category pages. Its seems like every year or so a New Page was constructed for each brand... Many of which have high quality and natural inbound links. However, the pages no longer have products and simply look outdated. I'm trying to figure out if they should place redirects on all the old pages to a new URL which is more seo friendly. Example Links : http://www.xyz.com/nike2004.html , http://www.xyz.com/nike-spring2006.html , http://www.xyz.com/2011-nike-shoes.html - (have quality inbound links, bad content) .... Basically would it be advantageous to place redirects on all of these example pages to a new one that will be more permanent... http://www.xyz.com/nike-shoes.html I'm also looking at about 15 brands and maybe 100+ old/outdated urls, so I wasn't sure if I should do this & to what extent. Considering many of the brand pages do rank, but not as well as they should... Any input would help, thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Absolute Internal Links and their Affect on Rankings for Local Businesses
For many localized search terms (City + Profession), I'm noticing that OpenSiteExplorer is reporting high numbers of backlinks for anchortext from Absolute internal links from that same domain. Now, I'm familiar with the difference in relative and absolute internal links but am wondering if this type of linking may be carrying a lot of weight for rankings. It may be a correlation over causation situation if it's more that those companies that are including absolute internal links for terminology are just doing a better job (generally) with internal linking... but I feel like this may be something worth digging into. Everything I have read says that search engines view absolute and relative internal links essentially equally but does anybody have their own insight on the effectiveness for these two types of internal links in regards to small local businesses who otherwise are getting basically no links at all?
Algorithm Updates | | Kirch0 -
After penguin 2.0, 20-25% drop sitewide, no google unatural links message, What could be causing it?
Hi,Since Penguin 2.0 we've taken a 20-25% knock but not recieved an unatural link message from Google. After sending a bunch of removal requests, I decided to submit a disavow file anyway two weeks ago and tried to make sure I rooted out some links that were built way back when our site started and link building best practice was a bit shadier. Analysis of our backlink profile points to about 40-50% links coming from general directories, wondering if perhaps their weight has been adjusted and this is why the drop occured? Having said that we have some high quality links from government sources and highly trusted sites so not too spammy. Can anyone shed some light or offer suggestions? Thanx
Algorithm Updates | | Mulith0 -
Is using WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) ok for On-Page SEO?
Hi Mozzers, I'm investigating multilingual site setup and translating content for a small website for 15-20 pages and came accross WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) which looks like it could help, but I am curious as to whether it has any major international SEO limitations before trialing/buying. It seems to allow the option to automatically setup language folder structures as www.domain.com/it/ or www.domain.com/es/ etc which is great and seems to offer easy way of linking out to translators (for extra fee), which could be convenient. However what about the on-page optimization - url names, title tags and other onpage elements - I wonder if anyone has any experiences with using this plugin or any alternatives for it. Hoping for your valued advice!
Algorithm Updates | | emerald0 -
Does Google index Wordpress pages with frames
Does Google or other search engines index Wordpress pages that use frames? Here is the site in question: http://www.source-nutrition.com/son/
Algorithm Updates | | BradBorst0
