Moz Analytics set up: should I use www or not when I do website set up?
-
Hello,
When doing website set up will www.mysite.com yield different results than just mysite.com ? Same about competitors: should I use www or not when I set up their sites? Or it won't matter?
Thanks,
Denis -
Hi Chlaryn,
Is it possible to change a current campaign from sub domain to root domain? Or will I have to create a new campaign from scratch?
Thanks!
-
Hey Gregory,
Thanks for following up. The site isn't showing faulty data, just different data since the www and non-www versions of the homepage are considered as different pages, which would have different PAs and a different number of links.
Even if your non-www pages redirect to the www versions, other sites may be linking to the non-www versions, which would change which pages are considered to have the highest PA depending on which version of the campaign you are looking at. The non-www versions of the pages still legitimately have links going to them and would be taken into account when we are calculating PA and DA. The non-www campaign is actually giving you a fuller picture of the site.
I hope this clears things up.
Chiaryn
-
Hello Chiaryn,
From what I see on my campaigns, what you are saying is only true if a site is all redirected to the root domain version, or if both the root and the www version are active.
If a site is redirected to the www version, a campaign that uses the root domain will show faulty data. Please see the images from my Campaigns for my site (which is redirected to the www version) that I have attached for proof.
The old Moz Pro campaign (shown on the left) is set up for the www version of the domain. The Moz Analytics campaign (shown on the right) was set up for the root domain. The data on the right is much more accurate for Page Authority, LRDs, Total External Links, and HTTP Status. The other odd result is that few of the Top Pages match from www-campaign to root-campaign.
Please let us know if I am interpreting these things wrongs, or if I have the campaigns set up incorrectly...
-
Hey Denis,
Both Joseph and Lesley make good points, but I wanted to jump in specifically in regard to our tool.
It really depends on how your site is set up, but creating the campaign for the full root domain mysite.com would mean that we crawl and track every page of the site (up to your crawl limit) include any subdomains you may have. If you create the campaign for the www.mysite.com subdomain, we will only crawl and track pages on the site that include the www prefix. This means if you are ranking for a keyword with the page mysite.com/awesomerelevantpage, we would not include that as a ranking for the www.mysite.com subdomain campaign. Also, if www.mysitecom redirects to mysite.com, we wouldn't follow the redirect so you would only get one page crawled.
My advice when creating a campaign in our tools is to set up the campaign for the full root domain so you get a full picture of your site, unless you only want to track a specific subset of the site separately from the rest of the site.
I hope this helps!
Chiaryn
Help Team Ninja -
When setting up Moz Analytics you should target it for whichever version of your domain you use.
If all your pages redirect to the www version, and all the search results featuring your pages have the www in front, then that is what you should set up Moz for.
This is not real easy as the set up screens seem to assume that you want to put in the plain non-www version. So you do have to enter the www version in the "What site do you want to track?" box on the first page of the set up screens.
When you get to the Competitor section, look and see if your competitors search results show up with www or store or blog or anything in front of their domain name and enter them the same way. That way you can compare apples to apples.
-
The question is a little bit deeper than you think. Using www. before your domain name is considered a sub domain name, the same as blog.domain.com or store.domain.com. When you design the site or start doing SEO on the site you should decide which way you would like your site accessed. You only want your site to be accessed from either www.site.com or site.com, not both. Which ever you chose, you should redirect the other address to it. I hope that all made sense.
-
You should use what you have set in google webmaster tools and whats indexed in google.
- site: domain.com
- site: www.domin.com
Good luck!
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
-
Moz site crawl doesn't work
The Moz site crawl isn't working for my campaign, but works for the site's on demand crawl. The search should not be disallowed by robots.txt or the headers. I'd like to be able to track the website for the campaign so I can see SEO gains / losses and increases / decreases in indexing.
Getting Started | | DrainKing0 -
Attempts to fix MOZ recommended issues resulted in drastic ranking drop.
I have a website built in SquareSpace. https://www.ruffhaus.com/ I recently started working with MOZ to track and improve organic SEO. After my initial site crawl, search visibility was reported at a waping 2.38%. Moz showed several critical crawler issues. Most were redirect, 4xx and long URL. So I started working on fixing the redirect and 4xx issues first. I thought this was a good thing. But now my already sad search visibility has dropped to .07% (-95.97%!). I also went from #1 on keyword, brand implementation plan (and 3 variations), to #27. What? Wondering where I went wrong and how to remedy? This is all new to me so I am sure I'm not providing all the info you need to answer my question. Hoping providing the site URL will help. Fire away!
Getting Started | | RuffHaus0 -
Anyone use On-Page Grades in Moz? Please Give us Feedback!
Jackie from Moz here. We're looking to get some feedback on the letter grades we use for On-Page Grades (in the application and in the Research Tools). We made this super easy survey to collect our Community's thoughts. Tell us what you think! Thanks for all your help!
Getting Started | | JackieRae2 -
Change non-www to www failed
Hello Guys, i was using non-www domain for my campaign, but then i realized Google Index my site with www. on it The scoring from non-www and www is different. I delete the campaign and recreate with correct one, but Moz always recognize the old domain Anything i miss ?
Getting Started | | viktor.iwan0 -
Does Moz Analytics need Google Analytics installed?
I have a few websites on my Moz Analytics account but only have data for one of them. All my other accounts keepy saying come back in 24hrs for more data, although there is no data available. Do I need to connect each account with Google Analytics before Moz populates its own analytics?
Getting Started | | david.smith.segarra1 -
Moz Analytics Beta Question
I've been invited to the Moz Analytics Beta; however, I am not seeing any data for any of my campaigns. Do I have to do something specific to enable the beta, or does it take a while for information to appear?
Getting Started | | Schwaab1