Removing www from printed and digital

[fdmgroup]

I wanted to make sure there will be no negative SEO implications if we change all ‘www.fdmgroup.com' references (printed and digital)?After some Googling, apparently some search engines regard www.fdmgroup.com and fdmgroup.com as two different websites and split SEO rankings (quote me if i’m wrong!).To date, a lot (if not all) of our online presence (e.g. adverts, banner links etc) use www.fdmgroup.com (both visually and in HTML markup) so these would also need updating to remove the 'www'.What are your thoughts? For the sake of SEO and canonical/duplicate content/ranking issues etc, would changing all www.fdmgroup.com references have a negative effect?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Christopher,

The set-up you have at the moment is actually fine for SEO - http://www.fdmgroup.com/ resolves the website. http://fdmgroup.com/ employs a 301 redirect to take users and search engines to http://www.fdmgroup.com/: http://i.imgur.com/et4AKYV.png

This is correct, http://fdmgroup.com/ would be seen as a separate "version" of the home page if it was allowed to load without sending everyone on to the "www" version via the 301 redirect. Furthermore, every page within the http://fdmgroup.com/ "version" of the website would be duplicated from the "www" version of each page.

If you want to change to use http://fdmgroup.com/ instead, using that both on advertising and having that be the version of the website that resolves for both users and search engines, you will need to reverse that 301 redirect. This will mean that when people try to visit http://**www.**fdmgroup.com/, they are redirected to http://fdmgroup.com/. This is a simple process.

However, it is inadvisable to go through redirection like this unless you really, really have to. When you redirect a URL with a 301 redirect, a large portion of the URL's authority is passed on to the new URL. Not all of the authority is passed though. As a result, your rankings and traffic can take a little hit for a short while. This is not usually a big problem, and usually resolves itself quickly but it is best avoided unless the redirection really has to take place.

I am tempted to say that "it looks cleaner" is not the best reason to go through this change when your current set-up is totally fine and correct for SEO purposes.

That said, you absolutely could reference fdmgroup.com in offline advertising for stylistic purposes. When people type that URL in, they'll be redirected to the www version just as they are now. This is pretty common because of the stylistic benefits of not including www in TV / print advertising.

[fdmgroup]

It looks cleaner without the www. Would it affect it negatively if we changed it? Thanks.

[GPainter]

Not to mention if you've set up preferred domain or canonical this doesn't even matter. The only thing you may consider is it easier to advertise (branding) with out www.

[DJ123]

www is considered a subdomain of the main domain.

Generally speaking, Google will give the main domain credit for what is on the subdomain.  I don't think this is always the case though if you have really specific content on a subdomain and it is targeted for a certain topic because people would start linking to the subdomain as opposed to the main domain.  So I think the correct answer is that it depends on your site and situation.  If you can, everything should go on 1 domain unless it makes sense for some other reason to split things on multiple domains/subdomains.

If you have a ton of advertising out there for www...., why change it?  Most people don't know that www is a subdomain (or care).  You are not going to pick up a significant advantage SEO wise by switching to the main domain vs using the www version, so just don't mess with it.

Unless for some reason you have a good reason to create a bunch of subdomains, like if you had a real estate site nationwide and you wanted them to be organized by city like houston.mysite.com, atlanta.mysite.com, etc.