Redundant Hostnames Issue in GA
-
I noticed another post on this, but I have another question. I am getting this message from Analytics:
Property http://www.example.com is receiving data from redundant hostnames. Consider setting up a 301 redirect on your website, or make a search and replace filter that strips "www." from hostnames. Examples of redundant hostnames: example.com, www.example.com.
We don't have a 301 in place that manages this and I am quite concerned about handling that the right way. We do have a canonical on our homepage that says:
rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/" /> I asked on another site how to safely set up our 301 and I got this response:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NE]Is this the best way of handling it? Are there situations where this would not be the best way?
We do have a few subdomains like beta.example.com in use and have a rather large site, so I just want to make sure I get it right.
Thanks for your help!
Craig
-
Rewrites are generally regarded as the best way to handle this kind of redirect, but your DNS provider likely has their own redirect system in place that can implement the same functionality without modifying your site's .htaccess. Same result, different technique.
The reason I use my DNS with a "www" subdomain record to forward to my non-www domain is because WordPress sometimes has issues with using RewriteRule. It seems to break permalinks. I always just set it once with my DNS host and never think about it again.
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
-
Issues with Magento layered navigation
Hi, We use Magento v.1.7 for our store. We have recently had an SEO audit and we have uncovered 2 major issues which can be pinpointed to our layered navigation. We use the MANAdev layered navigation module. There are numerous options available to help with SEO. All our filtered urls seem to be fine ie. https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/colour/natural-finish-with-letters/letters/lowercase have canonical url correctly setup and the meta tags as noindex, follow but Magento is churning out tons of 404 error pages like this https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/show/12/l/colour:24-4-9/letters:6-7 which google is indexing I'm at lost at how to solve this any help would be great. Thank you **This is from our SEO audit report ** The faceted navigation isn’t handled correctly and causes two major issues:● One of the faceted navigation filters causes 404 error. This means that the error isappended each sequence of the navigation options, multiplying the faulty URLs.● The pages created by the faceted nav are all accessible to the search engines. Thismeans that there are hundreds of duplicated category pages created by one of theparameters. The duplication issues can seriously hinder the organic visibility.The amount of 404 errors and the duplicated pages created by faceted navigation makes italmost impossible for a search engine crawler to finish the crawl. This means that the sitemight not be fully indexed and the newly introduced product pages or content won’t bediscovered for a very long time.
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Http v https Duplicate Issues
Hello, I noticed earlier an issue on my site. http://mysite.com and https://mysite.com both had canonical links pointing to themselves so in effect creating duplicate content. I have now taken steps to ensure the https version has a canonical that points to the http version but I was wondering what other steps would people recommend? Is it safe to NOINDEX the https pages? Or block them via robots.txt or both? We are not quite ready to go fully HTTPS with our site yet (I know Google now prefers this) Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | niallfred0 -
Quality Issues: My blog is blocked on Google Search Engine
Hi Webmasters, I got an email from google team. The email is included below. **Google Webmaster Tools: Quality Issues on http://abcdblogger.com/**August 8, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of http://abcdblogger.com/, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see ourWebmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team My blog is completely blocked on Google Search engine. I removed all existing posts and reinstalled a fresh version of wordpress and wrote a good article. I redirected all broken links my homepage with a 301. After making those changes I submitted a reconsideration request to Google, But they declined it. I doubt that the reason for blocking could be due to the backlinks pointing to my domain. I think Google's Disavow Tool help me to remove low quality backlinks, But how can I sort low quality backlinks using Opensite Explorer? If possible can you create a text file with all possible low quality links, So that I could submit it using Google Disavow Tool. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | hafiskani0 -
Odd Google Indexing Issue
I have encountered something odd with Google indexing. According to the Google cache my site was last updated on April 6. I had been making a series of changes on April 7th and none of them show up in the cached version of the site (naturally). Then, on the 8th, my rankings seem to have dropped about 6 places and the main SERP is showing a text that isn't even on the Web site. The cached version has the correct page title from the page that was indexed on the 6th. How do I learn where Google is picking this up from? There is a clean page title tag on my Web site. I've checked the server, etc to see what's going on. The text isn't completely unrelated, but it definitely impacted my ranking. Does Google ever have these hiccups when indexing?
Technical SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Facebook Like button issue
In looking through my top pages in Google Analytics, my #2 page (oddly enough) looked like this "/?fb_xd_fragment=". Apparently, this is because we added the Facebook Like button to many of our pages. But I'm worried these show very skewed PageView data and lower Time Spent on each page. The average time on this page is 5 seconds whereas the average sitewide time is much higher. Further, it shows 9,000 pageviews coming from only 250 Unique Visitors. I'm sure this is messing with our SEO. Is there a fix for this? Should I even be worried about it? I heard that I can remove it from my GA stat reporting, but I don't want it to be causing problems in the background. Please advise..my boss wants to keep the Facebook Like button the pages as it has brought us some good response. The page that this is on is: www.accupos.com Maybe there's an alternate version of the Facebook Like that we don't know about... I would appreciate any help on this DM
Technical SEO | | DerekM880 -
What's the best way to solve this sites duplicate content issues?
Hi, The site is www.expressgolf.co.uk and is an e-commerce website with lots of categories and brands. I'm trying to achieve one single unique URL for each category / brand page to avoid duplicate content and to get the correct URL's indexed. Currently it looks like this... Main URL http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green Different Versions http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/1 http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/2 http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/3 http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/4 http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/all http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/1/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/2/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/3/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/4/ http://www.expressgolf.co.uk/shop/clothing/galvin-green/all/ Firstly, what is the best course of action to make all versions point to the main URL and keep them from being indexed - Canonical Tag, NOINDEX or block them in robots? Secondly, do I just need to 301 the (/) from all URL's to the non (/) URL's ? I'm sure this question has been answered but I was having trouble coming to a solution for this one site. Cheers, Paul
Technical SEO | | paulmalin0 -
Duplicate Content issue
I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic. Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version: http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes That page also has a link to a printer friendly version http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes and so on and so on....... Some of these pages are being included in Google's index. I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted. Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?
Technical SEO | | CPLDistribution0 -
Is there any issue with using the same structured data property multiple times on the same page?
Im working on implementing structured data properties into my product detail pages. (http://schema.org/Book) My site sells books and many books have both a 13 digit ISBN # and a 10 Digit ISBN. Should I apply the itemprop "isbn" to both of them or just the one with higher search volume? Some books also have multiple authors, how should I handle that?
Technical SEO | | myork07240