Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Check yours now
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version?

    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.

    We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    7
    2391
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Caffeine_Marketing
      Caffeine_Marketing Subscriber last edited by

      We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version?

      Thant way all forms of the website are pointing to one version?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • BlueprintMarketing
        BlueprintMarketing @Caffeine_Marketing last edited by

        I am happy I could be of help please let me know if there's anything else I can be of assistance with?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • BlueprintMarketing
          BlueprintMarketing @Caffeine_Marketing last edited by

          PS I will run a crawl to check

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • BlueprintMarketing
            BlueprintMarketing @Caffeine_Marketing last edited by

            It is fine to 301 redirect to** "/"** you need to pick forward slash "/" or no forward slash.

            • SEE:
            • https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
            • https://www.seroundtable.com/google-trailing-slashes-url-24943.html

            You should force HTTPS

            • http://cardiff.co.uk 301's to http://www.cardiff.co.uk/
            • See: https://i.imgur.com/fg34sXR.png
            • You should add https
            • https://dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up
            • or
            • https://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.html

            Add a SSL cert I would just add cloudflare.com (if you want fast & easy also Free)

            • https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/204144518
            • https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172286-Configuring-URL-forwarding-or-redirects-with-Cloudflare-Page-Rules

            When configuring Page Rules, the Always use HTTPS action is the simplest method to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS.  You can also use the Forwarding URL action with a 301 redirect if you need to redirect to another subdomain in addition to forcing HTTPS. For example, a Page Rule match for

            **_http://_cardiff.co.uk_/*_**
            

            with a _Forwarding URL _of

            **_https://www.cardiff.co.uk/$1_**
            

            https://www.cardiff.co.uk/

            ASP.NET

            or ASP.NET

            <%@ Language="VBScript" %>
            <%
            ' ASP permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com
            Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
            Response.AddHeader "Location", "https://www.cardiff.co.uk/"
            Response.End
            %>

            Redirect entire domain from HTTP to HTTPS

            RewriteEngine On
            RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
            RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
            

            Redirect entire domain from non-www to www and HTTP to HTTPS

            RewriteEngine On
            RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
            RewriteRule ^ https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
            RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
            RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
            RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
            

            Hope this helps,

            Tom

            fg34sXR.png

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Caffeine_Marketing
              Caffeine_Marketing Subscriber last edited by

              Thank you for the advice it is very useful.

              In GWT we are also showing redirects on all pages from the non / page to the / page

              ie cardiff.co.uk redirects to  cardiff.co.uk/

              is this OK?

              BlueprintMarketing 3 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • BlueprintMarketing
                BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                if you talking about the domain

                you should 301 redirect each of the 3 of 4 different URLs to the one you want to be the primary domain that is using https

                This is a great guide

                https://ahrefs.com/blog/301-redirects/

                You can always use CloudFlare as free & easy fix.

                If you want to use HSTS preload or just HSTS

                Test your 301 setup using

                https://hstspreload.org/?domain=example.com

                If you are using https://www.  as the primary

                See you must force http to https and the HTTP://www

                Must redirect to the https:// bare domain so that means two redirects.

                Error: No redirect from HTTPhttp://example.com does not redirect to https://example.com.

                Hope this helps,

                Tom

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Xiano
                  Xiano Subscriber last edited by

                  Ideally, yes.

                  However, it's not likely to have a massive impact if you do have a redirect chain first to www and then to https.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • vikasnwu

                    Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP

                    We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized.  As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site.  However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet.  So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors.  The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https.  I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu
                    1
                  • dsbud

                    301 redirect hops from non-https and www

                    It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud
                    0
                  • gozmoz

                    Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com

                    I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
                    Page Authority 40
                    Linking Root Domains 31
                    External Link Count 138
                    Internal Link Count 18
                    Status Code 200
                    1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
                    Page Authority 19
                    Linking Root Domains 1
                    External Link Count 0
                    Internal Link Count 15
                    Status Code 200
                    1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
                    To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
                    Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
                    Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
                    or
                    Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
                    Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
                    0
                  • Sayers

                    Googlebot being redirected but not users?

                    Hi, We seem to have a slightly odd issue. We noticed that a number of our location category pages were slipping off 1 page, and onto page 2 in our niche. On inspection, we noticed that our Arizona page had started ranking in place of a number of other location pages - Cali, Idaho, NJ etc. Weirdly, the pages they had replaced were no longer indexed, and would remain so, despite being fetched, tweeted etc. One test was to see when the dropped out pages had been last crawled, or at least cached. When conducting the 'cache:domain.com/category/location' on these pages, we were getting 301 redirected to, you guessed it, the Arizona page. Very odd. However, the dropped out pages were serving 200 OK when run through header checker tools, screaming frog etc. On the face of it, it would seem Googlebot is getting redirected when it is hitting a number of our key location pages, but users are not. Has anyone experienced anything like this? The theming of the pages are quite different in terms of content, meta etc. Thanks.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers
                    0
                  • Steven_Macdonald

                    Switching from HTTP to HTTPS: 301 redirect or keep both & rel canonical?

                    Hey Mozzers, I'll be moving several sites from HTTP to HTTPS in the coming weeks (same brand, multiple ccTLDs). We'll start on a low traffic site and test it for 2-4 weeks to see the impact before rolling out across all 8 sites. Ideally, I'd like to simply 301 redirect the HTTP version page to the HTTPS version of the page (to get that potential SEO rankings boost). However, I'm concerned about the potential drop in rankings, links and traffic. I'm thinking of alternative ways and so instead of the 301 redirect approach, I would keep both sites live and accessible, and then add rel canonical on the HTTPS pages to point towards HTTP so that Google keeps the current pages/ links/ indexed as they are today (in this case, HTTPS is more UX than for SEO). Has anyone tried the rel canonical approach, and if so, what were the results? Do you recommend it? Also, for those who have implemented HTTPS, how long did it take for Google to index those pages over the older HTTP pages?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven_Macdonald
                    0
                  • mrodriguez1440

                    Screaming Frog returning both HTTP and HTTPS results...

                    Hi, About 10 months I switched from HTTP to HTTPS. I then switched back (long story). I noticed that Screaming Frog is picking up the HTTP and HTTPS version of the site. Maybe this doesn't matter, but I'd like to know why SF is doing that. The URL is: www.aerlawgroup.com Any feedback, including how to remove the HTTPS version, is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez1440
                    0
                  • EcommerceSite

                    How do I add https version of site to Bing webmaster tools?

                    I could add my site to Google Webmaster tools with no problems, but when I try to add it in Bing webmaster tools it just redirects me to what I already have. Everything is staying the same but the switch from http to https. Anyone else experienced this? This is what I just received back from Bing and it doesn't seem right- I understand that you switched to the https version of your site and you're now trying to use the Site Move tool. However, in order to do this, you must verify the https version of your site first. You cannot do this because it just redirects you to the dashboard. We thank you for reporting this to us. We've investigated on this matter and can see that you're already put a redirect from the http to the https version of your site. We also checked the /BingSiteAuth.xml file and this also redirects to the https version. At this point, we suggest that you remove the current website (http version) that is verified through Bing Webmaster Tool and add your https domain. When done, use the Site Move tool. Thoughts?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite
                    1
                  • Davenport-Tractor

                    Redirecting non www site

                    Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT:  " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain.  301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names.  Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.