Hi, I am little bit confused in 301 redirect
-
Hi, I am little bit confused I have set my preferred domain to www but anyone can access my site via both www and non www domains, do I need to 301 redirect all non www to www or not , If yes then I want to know Why and If no then also I want to Why.
-
Hi Amarjit,
If you set up the preferred domain in Google Webmaster, in reality that should be fine for most SEO purposes.
That said, it's still best practices to redirect visitors to one version or another. It's doubtful you'll see much SEO benefit from it, but it might make things easier from a consistancy point of view, and it's long been a regular practice of most SEOs.
You can read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Best of luck!
-
Hi Mike,
Actually, I could be wrong, but I don't believe this is required. Google will ask during setup if you want to track subdomains, (and technically www is a subdomain) but I believe this is mostly for the benefit of how the data is displayed in the reports.
For www or non-www, Google will 'count' both as long as the tracking code is on the page. Depending on your analytics setup, you may or may not be able to determine if the visitor landed on a www page or not, but the page visit will register.
Does that make sense? I'm being very broad here, apologies for that.
-
Yes I got, Thanks
-
You would need to setup Google Analytics with a www version and a non-www version to view traffic information. Same goes for managing your site, you need to setup both version in Google Webmaster Tools if you want to see data for both.
Google views the non-www version and the www version as two separate sites, that is why you need to set it up twice if that is the route you choose to take.
Does that answer your question?
Mike
-
Hi, Thanks to all of you. Actually I want to ask if I will not redirect than if someone is coming to my non www version that visit will be counted by google analytics ? or not
-
When you say "set my preferred domain to www" do you mean via webmaster tools? if so google does not have control over your site, so of course there will be no forced redirect.
www.yourdomain.com is different from yourdomain.com, so you can pr can be split (if your backlinks are a mix of both).
should you do a force redirect for www, via htaccess? yes, why? its good practice and easy to do. also it will fix it for bing and other search engines
-
Without additional information, I can only make a guess on your first comment, "I have set my preferred domain to www..." - are you talking about doing this is Google Webmaster Tools? If so, that is simply telling Google that you would prefer they index your www version versus your non-www version.
Depending on your CMS, you should be able to write some code to automatically redirect all non-www calls to your site to their www counterparts. If you are using IIS, you'd edit your web.config file. If you are using Apache, you'd edit your .htaccess file.
Does that make sense?
Mike
-
If you have set your preferred domain then its fine. It means you have already told Google about your preference.
If your website is old and you have made several backlinks on you non-preferred domain then link juice will not be transfer. It will be a better practice if you will do it also through 301 redirection.
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
-
301 redirect syntax for htaccess
I'm working on some htaccess redirects for a few stray pages and have come across a few different varieties of 301s that are confusing me a bit....Most sources suggest: Redirect 301 /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html or using some combination of: RewriteRule + RewriteCond + RegEx I've also found examples of: RedirectPermanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html I'm confused because our current htaccess file has quite a few (working) redirects that look like this: Redirect permanent /pageA.html http://www.site.com/pageB.html This syntax seems to work, but I'm yet to find another Redirect permanent in the wild, only examples of Redirect 301 or RedirectPermanent Is there any difference between these? Would I benefit at all from replacing Redirect permanent with Redirect 301?
Technical SEO | | SamKlep1 -
Help creating a 301 redirect in my htaccess file
Hi Guys, I'm trying to build a 301 file with the file requirements: It should be visible only for Google and other Search Engine Agents. It will have a few direct redirects. A few URL must be dynamic redirect. For example each page the starts with olddomain.com/category and is not in the list of of direct redirects should be redirect for newdomain.com/category Here is my start point: #301 Starts here Set the agents RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | Felip3
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} msnbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Slurp Make the direct redirect. Redirect 301 /category/sub1 http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub1
Redirect 301 /category/sub2 http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub2 Redirect everything else Redirect 301 /category/* http://www.newdomain.com/category #End of my 301 Will that work how I want? is there anything wrong?0 -
Do 301 redirects now allow most of the bad value to pass through?
I heard after the 3.2 update that most of your bad history passes though the 301 redirect.. What do you guys think out there?
Technical SEO | | Merta19801 -
Is my 301 redirect working?
Very simple question here . I've redirected a bunch of older pages with decent ranking to some newer pages on my site, using the Thesis theme's built-in redirect function. However, in the SERPS, the older pages (and, importantly, older titles) still show up. When clicked on, they redirect to the new page, but it's still irritating because the older titles make the site look out of date. Is this Working As Intended, or have I or my theme done something wrong? And if it's the latter, what's the best way to achieve a redirect, preferably with a Wordpress plugin?
Technical SEO | | Cairmen0 -
How to safely reduce the number of 301 redirects / should we be adding so many?
Hi All, We lost a lot of good rankings over the weekend with no obvious cause. Our top keyword went from p3 to p12, for example. Site speed is pretty bad (slower than 92% of sites!) but it has always been pretty bad. I'm on to the dev team to try and crunch this (beyond image optimisation) but I know that something I can effect is the number of 301 redirects we have in place. We have hundreds of 301s because we've been, perhaps incorrectly, adding one every time we find a new crawl error in GWT and it isn't because of a broken link on our site or on an external site where we can't track down the webmaster to fix the link. Is this bad practice, and should we just ignore 404s caused by external broken URLs? If we wanted to reduce these numbers, should we think about removing ones that are only in place due to external broken URLs? Any other tips for safely reducing the number of 301s? Thanks, all! Chris
Technical SEO | | BaseKit0 -
301-redirect
Hi My website is fairly new and i wasnt aware of the difference btw 'website.com' and 'www.website.com' when i started up. It doesnt matter which one i use as long as i am consistent right ? Most of my ingoing links are to mainpage on 'website.com'. I have som ingoing links to 'www.website.com' but also some to 'www.website.com/brandname'. is it enough to 301-redir 'www.website.com' to 'website.com' or does it need to be done on several levels ? I need to have someone do the redirect for me - how can i check its working when its done ? Dan Lærum
Technical SEO | | danlae0 -
301 Redirects
Last year we merged 3 websites into 1 website and launched the new site in February. When developing the new site I created 301 redirects for all the pages from the old sites to the new site. Unfortunately when the new website was created the URLs were not optimised for search engines. I now need to optimised the page URLs. In theory I need to create new 301 redirects from this existing pages to the new optimised URLS. I am concerned that in a few years I might end up with a string of 301 redirects and if I break some links I might loose some ranking. How many redirects will link juice work for? I hope I'm clear here, if not I've attached a image showing what I'm doing. Thank you. unledfh.jpg
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0 -
301 redirect from domain to home.aspx
We have been asked to look at a website and have found a 301 redirect from the domain www.domain.com to www.domain.com/home.aspx. Why would someone do this, this way round? We can't think of a good reason and are wondering if we have overlooked something? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | travelinnovations0