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
-
Fire a tag when element is loaded on page (Google Tag Manager)
I'm using an Element Visibility trigger to track a value that appears on a page. However, I want to track this value even when the user doesn't scroll to the area of the page where the element is (i.e. when the page is loaded, and the value is displayed below the fold, but the user doesn't scroll down there). Is there a way of doing this
Reporting & Analytics | | RWesley0 -
Page Speed or Site Speed which one does Google considered a ranking signal
I've read many threads online which proves that website speed is a ranking factor. There's a friend whose website scores 44 (slow metric score) on Google Pagespeed Insights. Despite that his website is slow, he outranks me on Google search results. It confuses me that I optimized my website for speed, but my competitor's slow site outperforms me. On Six9ja.com, I did amazing work by getting my target score which is 100 (fast metric score) on Google Pagespeed Insights. Coming to my Google search console tool, they have shown that some of my pages have average scores, while some have slow scores. Google search console tool proves me wrong that none of my pages are fast. Then where did the fast metrics went? Could it be because I added three Adsense Javascript code to all my blog posts? If so, that means that Adsense code is slowing website speed performance despite having an async tag. I tested my blog post speed and I understand that my page speed reduced by 48 due to the 3 Adsense javascript codes added to it. I got 62 (Average metric score). Now, my site speed is=100, then my page speed=62 Does this mean that Google considers page speed rather than site speed as a ranking factor? Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/YSxSwOG **Regarding: **https://six9ja.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingsmart1 -
Redirecting all URLs appended with index.htm or index.html
It has come to my attention with one of my clients (WordPress website) that for some time they have within their Landing Page report (of GA - Google Analytics) URLs that should all be pointing to the one page, example: domain.com/about-us, also has a listing in GA as domain.com/about-us/index.htm Is this some kind of indication of a subdirectory issue? Has anyone had experience with this in such wordpress plugins as Yoast SEO, or other SEO plugin? My thoughts here are to simply redirect any of these non-existent files with a redirect in .htaccess - but what I'm using isn't working. I will insert the redirect here - - and any help would be greatly appreciated. RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html?
Reporting & Analytics | | cceebar
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html?$ http://www.dupontservicecenter.com/$1 [R=301,L] and this rewrite doesn't work: RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+).htm$ http://dupontservicecenter.com/$1.php [R,NC] _Cindy0 -
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 -
Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?
My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product. Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same. I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.
Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Find Pages with 0 traffic
Hi, We are trying to consolidate the amount of landing pages on our site, is there any way to find landing pages with a particular URL substring which have had 0 traffic? The minimum which appears in google analytics is 1 visit.
Reporting & Analytics | | driveawayholidays0 -
Sudden Increase In Number of Pages Indexed By Google Webmaster When No New Pages Added
Greetings MOZ Community: On June 14th Google Webmaster tools indicated an increase in the number of indexed pages, going from 676 to 851 pages. New pages had been added to the domain in the previous month. The number of pages blocked by robots increased at that time from 332 (June 1st) to 551 June 22nd), yet the number of indexed pages still increased to 851. The following changes occurred between June 5th and June 15th: -A new redesigned version of the site was launched on June 4th, with some links to social media and blog removed on some pages, but with no new URLs added. The design platform was and is Wordpress. -Google GTM code was added to the site. -An exception was made by our hosting company to ModSecurity on our server (for i-frames) to allow GTM to function. In the last ten days my web traffic has decline about 15%, however the quality of traffic has declined enormously and the number of new inquiries we get is off by around 65%. Click through rates have declined from about 2.55 pages to about 2 pages. Obviously this is not a good situation. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer is examining the issue. They think there may be some tie in with the installation of GTM. They are noticing an additional issue, the sites Contact Us form will not work if the GTM script is enabled. They find it curious that both issues occurred around the same time. Our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader. Does anyone have any idea why these extra pages are appearing and how they can be removed? Anyone have experience with GTM causing issues with this? Thanks everyone!!!
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
Does analytics track an order two times by refresh on the confirmation-page?
Hi there,
Reporting & Analytics | | Webdannmark
I have a quick question. Does Google analytics track an order two times, if the user buys a product, see the confirmation page and then click refresh/click or back and forward again?
The order/tracking data must be the same, but i guess the tracking code runs for every refresh and therefore tracks the order two times in Analytics or does analytics know that it is the same order? Someone that can clearify this?Thanks! Regards
Kasper0