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
-
Seeing very few pages analysed re: Mobile usability, in Google Seach Console - why?
Hi Mozzers, Under Mobile Usability, in Google Search Console, I am seeing very few website pages getting analysed - 10 out of 40 static pages, on the website in question. Is this to be expected or does this indicated an indexing problem on mobile?
Reporting & Analytics | | McTaggart0 -
Avg Page Load Time (sec) Comppared to site average - what does it mean?
Hi All, In google analytic In Site Speed -> Page Timings we have two columns a) Page Views & b) Avg Load Time (sec) compared to site average. Now in "b" column I am able to below % one in green and another in brown so what does it mean? Can anyone please explain me? Image attached Thanks! bNbBA
Reporting & Analytics | | amu1230 -
Google Analytics direct traffic dropped by 50% after switching to https
Hi, everyone, have a little dilemma and was hoping to get some advice here. I recently installed a new SSL (3 months ago) to force our URL to start with https://. The site was earlier accessible through https:// and http:// prefix however now I have made it so that all urls are redirected to the correct https:// version. The problem is that direct traffic has dropped by more than 50% after implementing these changes and I can for the life of me figure out why. Why would the direct traffic drop all of sudden after making these changes? I am starting to suspect that the earlier data was inflated and that Google analytics was counting users coming from a http:// version of the URL to a https:// version of the URL was counted as direct traffic. Could that be it? Any other possible causes? Would really appreciate any guidance on this problem. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | nsereke0 -
Drop in indexation but increase in organic traffic
We've had a puzzling drop in indexed pages on our ecommerce website. My crawl returns just over 25k items. Until 19/6 we had about 23-24k indexed. Then we experienced a sudden drop from 19/6 to 26/6: from 23,400 to 18,999, losing 4.4k pages from one week to the next. At the same time, our organic traffic has not decreased, it actually increased, however, it's only been a couple of weeks so that may be coincidence. A few things that have happened during the past few weeks: 31/5: we implemented pagination on category pages to avoid issues with duplicate content - could it be that this led to a decrease in indexed pages 3 weeks later? However, I can only find about 1.5k pages in my crawl that are page 2+ 18-19/6: we had some website outages over the weekend; as a B2B business, we don't get much traffic over the weekend, so I can't see an impact to traffic. However, the following week, indexation dropped by another 250 (then stayed the same this past week), so I don't think this was a factor. 21/6: we retired another website and migrated it to our main website. However, all pages were redirected to existing pages so no new pages were created for the migration. This doesn't really explain a decrease in indexation, but may account for some of the increase in organic traffic; however not all as the retired website hardly got any organic traffic. So, should we be worried? As our website is quite large, it would probably be quite difficult to pin point exactly which pages dropped off the index, but a loss of 19% of pages is quite significant. Then again, it doesn't appear to have negatively impacted organic traffic... Have you got any suggestions for what I should be looking at to find out what happened? Should I be worried at this point? I will definitely continue to have an eye on how our organic traffic (and indexation) develops but I am not sure if there is anything I can do at this point. I'd appreciate your advice on this, to make sure I am not missing something blindingly obvious. Thanks! RmWaNib JJm4tC3
Reporting & Analytics | | ViviCa10 -
How does Google measure page position in Webmasters?
Does anyone know exactly how Google measures page position in Webmaster Tools? For example: In Google Webmaster Tools, we had a product which on the 22/12/15 was at position 7, and then dropped to position 112 on the 30/12/15. It then rose back up to position 7 on the 6/01/16 and then down to position 25 on the 16/01/16. What does this mean and why?
Reporting & Analytics | | CostumeD0 -
Www and non www versions of the site: 301 redirects but I still get impressions on the wrong version
hallo, I moved from www.bastabollette.it to bastabollette.it, setting a 301 redirect. If I check google search console, I still get impressions and looks like all old www pages are stille indexed. (see attached) why? how can I fix this? thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | micvitale0 -
Differences in organic search visits and non-paid keyword visits
Hi folks, I was just wondering at the disparity between the "Organic Search Visits" total in the Traffic Data tab and the total visits from "Non Paid Keywords Sending Search Visits". Once you add up all the traffic generated from the individual keywords (including the not provided numbers) shouldn't the total match the number of organic search results? Or is there something I'm missing? At the moment the total visits from non-paid keywords is about 2,000 short of the total organic search visits.
Reporting & Analytics | | BrettCollins0 -
Page Optimization score is An A but Rank is dropping
New to company in SEO and they wanted a page to rank high for certain term : knowledge management on this page: http://www.apqc.org/knowledge-management Ran SEO Moz optimizer and did suggested changes. Moved score to A and ranking was on google first page but now it's dropped considerably last 2 months as the bounce rate has gone through the roof. I'm at my wits end and don't want the higher ups on me for the drop. I'm not sure what to try next.
Reporting & Analytics | | inhouseninja0