Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
-
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old.
My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools.
However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address.
When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction.
A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough.
QUESTION to the SEOmoz community:
What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain?
Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer."
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
-
The worst thing you can do is nothing.
Above is 5 examples of URLs which COULD all lead to the same page. There are numerous other possibilities as well. If you don't let Google know which version of the page is correct, then you will suffer the consequences of duplicate content.
What happens is Google doesn't know which page is correct. They will pick one of the non-www versions because that is what your Google WMT is set up to do. Meanwhile other versions of the pages are being used.
You are sending your link juice to a page, but it is a complete waste as it is not being considered by Google for SERP. You MUST resolve this issue if you care about SEO at all.
-
Thanks Ryan. So, if most of the links (including all internal links) are built with the www format then it is wise to change preferred domain settings to www and redirect the non www to the www domain?
Am I likely to damage rankings/traffic by doing this? What happens if I just leave it as is?
-
You are welcome to do so. Go to Google WMT, change your current option to the www, then adjust your .htaccess file as Steven suggested.
Also, canonicalize your pages to help ensure this issue can't happen again. Your .htaccess changes will work as long as the file is there, but things happen so it's better to be covered.
-
Guys,
Thanks for the input. I just want to do what is best for traffic and the site. I don't want to do anything that is going to tank my rankings and visitors.
I don't get alot of type in traffic.
www is the main way the links have been built, why not just redirect those to the non www version?
-
As Ryan said, make a decision. The easiest way to make sure either of your decisions sticks is to use an htaccess file and rewrite to your preferred.
If using the www version:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[0-9]+(.[0-9]+){3} [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]if using the non www version:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]A few other questions to keep in mind:
Do you get a lot of type-in traffic?
Do they tend to type the www?
In the SERP it is easier to read the domain name with out the www if looking for a specific domain name. Do you have a brand built where people just say your domain name?
-
You need to make a decision. Do you want your site address to be seen with or without the www?
Try to assess which version of your URL would require the least number of re-directs. You mentioned the links you built mostly include the www. Take a look at all of your links. You may have a higher number of organic links without the www. Evaluate all the links, then make a decision.
Once you make a decision, stick with it. Canonicalize all your pages with the correct version of the URL. Search your site for all internal links and standardize them.
While you are on this project standardize whether you use a "/" on the end of your url as well. www.mysite.com is not the same as www.mysite.com/. I make this suggestion because if you will go through the painful process of standardizing your site for the www issue, you should resolve all issues at once.
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
-
International SEO and duplicate content: what should I do when hreflangs are not enough?
Hi, A follow up question from another one I had a couple of months ago: It has been almost 2 months now that my hreflangs are in place. Google recognises them well and GSC is cleaned (no hreflang errors). Though I've seen some positive changes, I'm quite far from sorting that duplicate content issue completely and some entire sub-folders remain hidden from the SERP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
I believe it happens for two reasons: 1. Fully mirrored content - as per the link to my previous question above, some parts of the site I'm working on are 100% similar. Quite a "gravity issue" here as there is nothing I can do to fix the site architecture nor to get bespoke content in place. 2. Sub-folders "authority". I'm guessing that Google prefers sub-folders over others due to their legacy traffic/history. Meaning that even with hreflangs in place, the older sub-folder would rank over the right one because Google believes it provides better results to its users. Two questions from these reasons:
1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong? 2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Instead of trying to fix and "promote" hidden sub-folders, I'm thinking to actually reinforce the results I'm getting from stronger sub-folders.
I.e: if a user based in belgium is Googling something relating to my site, the site.com/fr/ subfolder shows up instead of the site.com/be/fr/ sub-sub-folder.
Or if someone is based in Belgium using Dutch, he would get site.com/nl/ results instead of the site.com/be/nl/ sub-sub-folder. Therefore, I could canonicalise /be/fr/ to /fr/ and do something similar for that second one. I'd prefer traffic coming to the right part of the site for tracking and analytic reasons. However, instead of trying to move mountain by changing Google's behaviour (if ever I could do this?), I'm thinking to encourage the current flow (also because it's not completely wrong as it brings traffic to pages featuring the correct language no matter what). That second question is the main reason why I'm looking out for MoZ's community advice: am I going to damage the site badly by using canonical tags that way? Thank you so much!
G0 -
Migrated Domain, 90% Drop in Organic Traffic, HELP!!!!
One week ago we migrated our old domain www.nyc-officespace-leader.com to https://www.metro-manhattan.com/. Our organic search traffic from Google has dropped about 90%. Is this normal? If so, how long should it take to recover? We filed a submitted a domain change request on Webmaster tools one week ago. We are noticing that many of the www.nyc-officespace-leader.com pages are still indexed which seems strange after a week. To complicate things, we filed a disavow file on April 9th for spammy links that pointed the NYC site. We filed the identical disavow of those links to the new Metro domain to ensure low quality links don't point to the new domain. Prior to making the domain change request, we migrated 30-40 non critical pages from NYC to Metro domains. Webmaster Tools indicated that the traffic was normal on the migrated pages. We then migrated remaining pages and filed the domain change request on April 4th. It is after April 4th that traffic and ranking declined. I would like to mention that there was no change in content; identical content was migrated from Metro to NYC This does not seem normal. Research prior to the migration indicated that if proper steps were taken it should proceed with limited disruption in traffic and ranking. Any ideas on how to remedy this situation? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
301 redirect to avoid duplicate content penalty
I have two websites with identical content. Haya and ethnic Both websites have similar products. I would like to get rid of ethniccode I have already started to de-index ethniccode. My question is, Will I get any SEO benefit or Will it be harmful if I 301 direct the below only URL’s https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez -> https://www.hayacreations/collections/salwar-kameez https://www.ethniccode/salwar-kameez/anarkali-suits - > https://www.hayacreations/collections/anarkali-suits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
How do I best handle Duplicate Content on an IIS site using 301 redirects?
The crawl report for a site indicates the existence of both www and non-www content, which I am aware is duplicate. However, only the www pages are indexed**, which is throwing me off. There are not any 'no-index' tags on the non-www pages and nothing in robots.txt and I can't find a sitemap. I believe a 301 redirect from the non-www pages is what is in order. Is this accurate? I believe the site is built using asp.net on IIS as the pages end in .asp. (not very familiar to me) There are multiple versions of the homepage, including 'index.html' and 'default.asp.' Meta refresh tags are being used to point to 'default.asp'. What has been done: 1. I set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools, as most links already point to www. 2. The Wordpress blog which sits in a /blog subdirectory has been set with rel="canonical" to point to the www version. What I have asked the programmer to do: 1. Add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages. 2. Set all versions of the homepage to redirect to www.site.org using 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags. Have all bases been covered correctly? One more concern: I notice the canonical tags in the source code of the blog use a trailing slash - will this create a problem of inconsistency? (And why is rel="canonical" the standard for Wordpress SEO plugins while 301 redirects are preferred for SEO?) Thanks a million! **To clarify regarding the indexation of non-www pages: A search for 'site:site.org -inurl:www' returns only 7 pages without www which are all blog pages without content (Code 200, not 404 - maybe deleted or moved - which is perhaps another 301 redirect issue).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Duplicate content from development website
Hi all - I've been trawling for duplicate content and then I stumbled across a development URL, set up by a previous web developer, which nearly mirrors current site (few content and structure changes since then, but otherwise it's all virtually the same). The developer didn't take it down when the site was launched. I'm guessing the best thing to do is tell him to take down the development URL (which is specific to the pizza joint btw, immediately. Is there anything else I should ask him to do? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate content for images
On SEOmoz I am getting duplicate errors for my onsite report. Unfortunately it does not specify what that content is... We are getting these errors for our photo gallery and i am assuming that the reason is some of the photos are listed in multiple categories. Can this be the problem? what else can it be? how can we resolve these issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Duplicate content question? thanks
Hi, Im my time as an SEO I have never come across the following two scenarios, I am an advocate of using unique content, therefore always suggest and in cases demand that all content is written or re-written. This is the scenarios I am facing right now. For Example we have www.abc.com (has over 200 original recipes) and then we have www.xyz.com with the recipes but they are translated into another language as they are targeting different audiences, will Google penalize for duplicate content? The other issue is that the client got the recipes from www.abc.com (that have been translated) and use them in www.xyz.com aswell, both sites owned by the same company so its not pleagurism they have legal rights but I am not sure how Google will see it and if it will penalize the sites. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_81