Awesome responses everyone - really appreciate this. It seems I have my work cut out across the various tools to try to identify root cause. At first, quick glance I don't see anything obvious popping up (for example to organic vs. direct) but I have more to check, based on the excellent input from the three of you. Thank you again!

Mark

I am seeing a pretty precipitous drop in search volume traffic (see link). My keyword rankings don't seem to have suffered too much over this period. In fact, my #1 keyword have actually increased slightly in this timeframe.

Two questions...

• Is there some way to assess overall search volume across my tracked keywords (to see if this is just a case of overall searches dropping)?
• Is there a recommended plan of attack for investigating drops like this - beyond overall search volume, what other data might be important in identifying the cause of this. In short, I'm looking for some logic/structure for how I investigate this, using Moz tools and reports.

Thanks.

Mark

omE1VPc

So far so good - every URL I try to my site is now redirected to the www subdomain and, to date, I am unaware of any side effects. I will keep monitoring but all looks good at this point.

Thanks again to everyone who helped with this.

Mark

Yep, totally agree with the thinking and prefer that approach. I researched the non-www (blank subdomain) solution a while back and the rewrite rule I used was suggested in a number of places. But your suggest seems much more robust, providing there's no gotcha (I know of none).

I implemented this and it seems to be working (after a bit of a detour because of caching :)). So, I think I am good and will monitor.

A big thanks to you and Travis. I very much appreciate the prompt responses.

Mark

Here's the only (remotely) relevant entry I have in my .htaccess file (replacing my actual domain with <domain>):</domain>

RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^<domain>.com$
 RewriteRule (.*) http://www.<domain>.com/$1 [R=301,L]</domain></domain>

The intent of this is to redirect all URLs of the form http://<domain>.com/page</domain> to http://www.<domain>.com/page.</domain> I implemented that a while back and it seems to be working just fine.

I can't find any reference to the blog subdomain. I suspect what I need to do is implement something like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.<domain>.com$
 RewriteRule (.*) http://www.<domain>.com/$1 [R=301,L]</domain></domain>

By the way, despite appearances I am "the guy" for this site. I've completely installed/configured it from scratch so anything broken is my fault  I have the smarts to backup, test, verify, restore etc so I can make changes to .htaccess myself. I just don't have significant experience of the .htaccess file itself so just need to be cautious as I go. But it's all me

Dare I suggest that what I am trying to achieve here (redirect from the blog subdomain to the www subdomain) shouldn't be too tricky?

Thanks.

Mark

Thanks again, Alan.

I am thinking that what I probably need is to 301 redirect all URLs of the form http://blog.<domain>.com/page</domain> to http://www.<domain>.com/page</domain>, yes? In short I don't want to use the blog subdomain anywhere so, to avoid SEO inefficiencies, I should presumably redirect as above so that everything ends up at the www subdomain.

I think

Thanks.

Mark

Travis,

I want to be really sure I understand what you are saying so let me clarify.

I do have a blog DNS entry, referring to the server (just like I have www, to the same IP address).  In a "clean" installation, any page being requested to that server, SHOULD redirect to the www subdomain because I have www.<domain>.com</domain> specified in General \ Settings. Is that accurate so far?

However, "something" (probably in .htaccess) is kicking in that allows URLs with the blog subdomain to resolve (no redirection), regardless of what is in General \ Settings, yes?

Thanks.

Mark

Thanks Alan. I would like to verify one aspect of this.

Somehow, Moz/Google located the blog.<domain>.com pages. I honestly don't know why but I assume that if these pages have actual resolved all along, as they do now, then I could potentially have external URLs pointing to them, yes? If so, then if I just follow the suggestion you have made then won't I continue to have duplicate content issues? I fear I am missing something from your suggestion :)</domain>

PS: I just realized what you perhaps meant. I have generally seen references to "non-www" to mean URLs of the form http://<domain>.com</domain> ie. with no subdomain. But I am guessing you mean "non-www" in the broader sense - absolutely ANYTHING that doesn't have the www subdomain should redirect there. That's presumably what you had in mind, yes?

Thanks again.

Mark

We are using the Redirection plugin.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

However, everything I have entered is at the page level (redirect page1 to page2). I don't know if the Redirection plugin even supports subdomain redirection. I am checking that now (a quick scan of the support page for that plugin finds every question related to subdomains unanswered :)).

It seems the working assumption is that nothing changed and that Moz/Google just found this for the first time, which I hadn't considered.

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you Travis. I have never actually edited the .htaccess file directly (not even 100% sure where it is :)) but I guess what you suggest could be put there through other means (plugins, etc).

Just to make sure I understand, though, what I actually want is a 301 redirect for all pages under the blog subdomain to the www domain. I'm not overly familiar with the .htaccess syntax for redirects (but can research) - but if you happen to have the syntax for that I'd be appreciative

Thanks again.

Mark

Thank you Leslie. Yes, I can browse to the blog... pages and they remain that way in the browsers URL field. So, the thinking is that this has been around all along and Moz/Google just found it? Interesting.

So, any idea on how I would fix this? I do use the Redirection plugin (and have been entering quite a few redirects recently) but as far as I can tell that plugin allows me to redirect between pages, rather than redirect subdomains i.e. I can redirect http://www.<domain>.com/page1</domain> to http://www.<domain>.com/page2</domain> but not www -> something else.

Thank you again, Leslie.

I should add that I do have a DNS record for the blog subdomain. However, that has been in place all along, including the last few weeks where these duplicate content errors didn't exist. Given the settings in Settings \ General I would expect these to be redirected to http://www.<domain>.com</domain>, which seems to be what was happening up until this weeks report.

Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week.

And then there's this weeks report.

For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared.

I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared.

FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect.

I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Mark