If I have set up my www as a cname, do I still need to add a redirect?
-
Hello,
I am trying to minimize my redirect chains that have been popping up in my Moz crawl issues. So I'd like to get clear on some best practices. I have a few clients that are getting their first redesign in a while. We are moving into Wordpress from good ole .html files. So I've installed a redirection plug in to create 301 redirects for those .html versions of the pages.
But apparently I am already redirecting from www to non-www. I have the www set up as a CNAME going to the IP address - is that counting as the redirection? Sometimes though, the www is set up by making it an A record. Is one way better than the other?
Finally, I'm forcing https for all my new sites now. Is whatever the host does to "force" https also counting as a redirect and contributing to my chain?
Any advice will be appreciated!
-
Thank you!
Yep - I redirect the .html files to the https domain to as specific a page as possible. Its good to know that I don't have to factor in the CNAME or A records into the issue.
It sounds like I am doing the right things from what you say - yet I do have some redirect chain warnings in my Moz crawl.
-
I'd like to confirm that a CNAME is indeed not a redirect and that Steve is absolutely right. You will need to set up a proper 301 redirect to go from one to the other.
-
\The redirects for the old .html structure should go to the preferred domain, ie: https://nonwww.com/most-relevant-new-location
CNAME is not a redirect and just points the user to the right server and I don't think switching is going to have any impact on what you're seeing. Some services like Cloudflare prefer you CNAME your www and non-www to the server to help protect the server IP.
The switch to https is an important one and you want to be sure that you take every step to make that smooth transition, ultimately getting https pages ranked instead of your http versions, and then users will be hitting your preferred URL scheme.
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
-
I'VE DONE EVERYTHING RIGHT BUT STILL GET LOW GOOGLE RANKING
Moz Pro Dashboard compared my site to three competitors' site. My site is better in every aspect. My DA is higher, I have four times more external links, I have more relevant content than my competition, my site also is the fastest, I have solved all redirect issues, there is no broken link internally or externally. We are custom home builders. So all our sites have numerous full screen images. I have optimized all of them. When I ran WebPageTest on my competition, they all fail. My site got A's in all categories. The three competitors' sites rank first, second and third. My site ranks bottom on the 2nd page. Since my site was online last January, I have spent thousands of dollars on SEO work. Its url is www.pokudesign.com I am hoping somebody can point me in the right direction. I am attaching a screen shot of my Moz Pro Dashboard. frEpZ
Moz Pro | | pokongku0 -
"redirects" with no "redirect address"?
Episode 2 of "Damon the idiot noob" web series . . . I have like . . ..90 plus temporary redirects in my moz "medium priority diagnostics". But the majority of them have a url, but no redicret url. How can it be a temporary redirect if there is no redirect address? Some of the addresses simply don't make any sense. Like: http://www.thirdcoastsigns.com/catalog/seo_sitemap/product How on earth would a "seo_sitemap" be followed my a "/product"? This is a Magento site, so I know some of these things get created automatically . .. but what on earth is going on here? Help welcome, appreciated, and welcome. Did I mention it is welcome and appreciated?
Moz Pro | | damon12120 -
Still Cant Crawl My Site
I've removed all blocks but two from our htaccess. They are for amazonaws.com to block amazon from crawling us. I did a fetch as google in our WM tools on our robots txt with success. SEOMoz crawler here hit's our site and gets a 403. I've looks in our blocked request logs and amazon is the only one in there. What is going on here?
Moz Pro | | martJ0 -
What is the best way to set up my seomoz campaign with multiple landing pages
I have 30 geo targeted landing pages under the same domain. So i want to track geo targeting keywords for each landing page. given this what is the best way to use seomoz and how do i set up and structure? example of landing page structure san francisco is - http://www.relationshipcounselingcenter.org nyc is - http://www.relationshipcounselingcenter.org/new-york-city-nyc-marriage-couples-therapy/ dc- http://www.relationshipcounselingcenter.org/washington-dc-marriage-couples-therapy/ etc Much thanks I'm a newbie to seomoz tools
Moz Pro | | sevin0 -
1 week has passed: Crawled pages still N/A
Roughly one week ago I went pro, and then I created a campaing for the smallish webshop that I'm employed at, however it doesn't seem to crawl. I've check our visitors log and while we find other bots such as google, bing, yandex and so fourth, seomoz bot hasn't been visible. Perhaps I'm looking for a normal useragent, ohwell, onwards. While I thought it might take time, as a small test I added a domain that I've owned for sometime but don't really use, that target site is only 17 pages, now this site was crawled almost within the hour, and I realised that our ~5000pages on the main campaing would take some time, but wouldn't the initial 250 pages be crawled by now? I should add, that I didn't add http:// to the original Campaing, but the one that got crawled I did. I cannot seem to change this myself inorder to spot if that's the problem or not. Anyone has any ideas, should I just wait or is there something I can activly do to force it to start rolling?
Moz Pro | | Hultin0 -
Should I be running my crawl on our www address or our non-www address?
I currently run our crawl on oursitename.com, but am wondering if it should be run on www.oursitename.com instead.
Moz Pro | | THMCC0 -
Why is my site showing a redirect that doesn't exist?
I have two sites. www.plasticandfoampackaging.com www.flyfitters.com Previously I had flyfitters 301 redirecting to plasticandfoampackaging. I stopped that about a month ago. I moved the nameservers and stopped the redirect. I am a novice but it seems to be working perfectly. However, SEOMOZ is showing that the redirect still exists. Does the site need to be recrawled or do I need to update the info somewhere? Please advise. Thanks Patrick
Moz Pro | | PlasticandFoamPackaging0 -
Bing ranking my non-www version of my site.
My site is ranking #1 on Bing for the non-www version of my homepage, but this is not showing in my ranking stats, since the site is setup in SEOMOZ as www version. Do I have to create a whole new campaign for the non-www version or is there a way to pickup these rankings?
Moz Pro | | pdlcom0