Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Switch to www from non www preference negatively hit # pages indexed
-
I have a client whose site did not use the www preference but rather the non www form of the url. We were having trouble seeing some high quality inlinks and I wondered if the redirect to the non www site from the links was making it hard for us to track.
After some reading, it seemed we should be using the www version for better SEO anyway so I made a change on Monday but had a major hit to the number of pages being indexed by Thursday. Freaking me out mildly.
What are people's thoughts? I think I should roll back the www change asap - or am I jumping the gun?
-
I agree 100% with Dan
You should essentially use all three big tools you can most likely find out using just two what the majority of the links point to.
Here is a great reason as to why you should care
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/7430/What-is-a-301-Redirect-and-Why-Should-You-Care.aspx
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
with one or both ( if it were my site I would want to see all the links pointing to it and how powerful they are so I would purchase one month of services from each or only only one the two below in addition to Moz open site Explorer simply because none of them have the entire link index)
If they point to the www.version of your domain then 301 redirect and remember to add the www.example.com and non-www- http://example.com
Using a 301 redirect discussed thoroughly in this link
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
&
this great guide
Then tell google you choice in Web Master tools
when you have found out which one has the most powerful relevant links pointing to it add both www. & no-www to Google webmaster tools and you can then select which one Google will index.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231
If its to close to call use marketing.grader.com to find out which one has more likes tweets and especially plus ones from Google because 301 redirects do not pass on social sharing you can use this as a tiebreaker.
Sincerely
Thomas
-
Hi Brigitte
To echo some of the other answer here, simply having www vs. non-www does not affect rankings at all directly. What matters is choosing one and keeping it consistent. This would mean consistent across;
- Internal links
- Always redirect from the non-preferred to the preferred
- Don't switch if you don't have to
- Try to get back links pointing at the preferred version
By the way, you need to register a separate google webmaster tools account for non-www (it is treated as a different website in terms of some of the data).
I would choose the version with the most backlinks pointing at it, honestly, and then keep it that way forever.
-Dan
-
First off if you are doing this just to assume that you will get more links because people type www.by default into a lot of things I would really not change it for that reason. It only reason I would change it is if you are going to introduce some sort of software like google page speed which needs a subdomain. Regardless first make sure that you have actually done at 301 redirect use this tool put in your URL
http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/
I would do return the site to how it was Unless you have good reason to believe that you actually acquire more links this way. Or you have more www. links pointing at your site.
I do not believe that it is the end of the world by any means, but I do not think that if you are having problems receiving links you are going to solve anything by adding at www.
You need to work on various white hat methods of gaining links.
Not changing around yours website architecture.
If you decide that you do want to add the www. Then by all means let Google know that your making a change by telling them that you are changing domains Inside of Google Webmaster tools.
I know you are not changing the domain however you want to treat it just like you Are That Way, Google will come back and index your site quite frequently a lot more than it would otherwise.
When you change your link structure treat it like a domain change.
http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
http://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/changes-of-domain/
It is going to take over 10% of your link juice away from anything going to the non-www. and add the same amount if you have a lot of powerful links going to www. it might be worth it.
But I still think you are looking in the wrong place for links.
Make sure your site is being indexed if you change it or if you do not.
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/indexation-problems-diagnosis-using-google-webmaster-tools/
Try press releases or other white hat methods.
all the best,
Thomas
-
There shouldnt be any problem with incoming links because of that.
As William said though, you will see some changes, but you will recover. Sometimes, it will take a long time to fully get Google to index the correct urls so don't jump the gun. Decide and stick with one.
-
You are basically 301 redirecting an entire site to a new URL (the "www" subdomain). So treat this like any other 301, you will dip, but it should recover for the most part.
In the future, I wouldn't recommend changing the www status after a suite is established, even if the preference changes.
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
-
Strange landing page in Google Analytics
Hello MOZ Community, The website in question is https://x-y.com/ When i looked at the landing pages report in GA , x-y.com is appended at the end of every URL like this. https://x-y.com/x-y.com When i open the above URL in GA interface, it shows page not found. This is obvious as there is no such URL.
Reporting & Analytics | | Johnroger
The metrics like sessions, Users, Bounce rate all look good. In the property settings, The default URL is written like this http:// cell-gate.com (Please note that s is missing in property settings). But how is traffic tracked correctly How do i solve this problem. What settings should we change to make the landing pages report look ok Thanks0 -
PDF best practices: to get them indexed or not? Do they pass SEO value to the site?
All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events. The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs. What are best practices in this area? To index or not? What do you / your clients do and why? Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)
Reporting & Analytics | | hlwebdev1 -
Google analytics suddenly stopped tracking all my landing pages
Hey guys. I love the new update of GA. Looks so clean. So, of course, I was excited to see how my landing pages were doing. I went to behavior, all content, all pages. And I noticed it's only showing me 19 pages out of the 93 I have indexed. And none of the top ones at all! Can't find them anywhere in GA! Anyone seen this before? Thank you so much
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29\. We have been building good links from high DA pages and producing quality, regular content.
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29. We have been building good links from high DA sites and producing regular, good quality content. Anyone able to offer any ideas why? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ProMOZ1231 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Google Analytics Goal/Event/SOMETHING to show only Wordpress "Posts", not pages, etc
Hi all, Our site is build on Wordpress and formerly the post URL's had the typical date format at the beginning. This made it easy for me to look at, for example, all search traffic to the blog. I would just view URL's containing /2014/ and /2015/ and boom. We have since removed the dates from the URL's with proper redirects etc, which is great, but now I can't figure out a way to look at ONLY the blog in GA. I like to track a KPI of 'search visits to blog posts' and I can't figure out how to now. Can I set up a GA event that only fires when the post type template for blog posts loads? Some other solution? I'm lost here, and there's gotta be a good way to do it...
Reporting & Analytics | | 3DR0 -
Why google stubbornly keeps indexing my http urls instead of the https ones?
I moved everything to https in November, but there are plenty of pages which are still indexed by google as http instead of https, and I am wondering why. Example: http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum correctly redirect permanently to https://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum Nevertheless if you search for pneumatici barum: https://www.google.it/search?q=pneumatici+barum&oq=pneumatici+barum The third organic result listed is still http. Since we moved to https google crawler visited that page tens of time, last one two days ago. But doesn't seems to care to update the protocol in google index. Anyone knows why? My concern is when I use API like semrush and ahrefs I have to do it twice to try both http and https, for a total of around 65k urls I waste a lot of my quota.
Reporting & Analytics | | max.favilli0 -
How do you set www vs non-www in Bing Webmaster Tools?
A site of mine is showing as example.com instead of www.example.com in Bing and Yahoo. I know where to set the preferred domain to www in Google Webmaster Tools, but I can't seem to find that function in Bing Webmaster Tools. Can someone please point me in the right direction?
Reporting & Analytics | | DentalPlanSEO0