Is there any SEO impact to using "www" vs. non-"www" preferred domain name?
-
My client has been using "www" with his domain and before I took over, has used it in marketing etc. I typically don't use "www" in my wordpress setup, and set non-www as the preferred domain in google analytics and google search console. Does it make any difference? Especially when www resolves to non-www?
I appreciate some guidance with this.
-
Thanks Tymen, but the question was specifically regarding www vs. non-www. Thanks anyway!
-
Hi Cindy, Going over to https://yourdomain.com DOES have a positive effect on SEO. Maybe it is wise to do that since you are changing anyway.
Regards, Tymen
-
Thanks, that's what I thought!
-
No, it does not matter what you choose so long as you choose one. In my opinion (I am one of the last baby boomers), my generation is more apt to use www than millenials. But, I have used non www since I knew it was irrelevant a long time ago.
So if you type in drumBEATMarketing.com in the search navigation you will see our site resolve as www.drumBEATMarketing.com. If we had originally set the preferred domain as non www, and you type in www.drumBEATMarketing.com, it would have resolved without the www. Just choose one in search console - (GWMT) and all will be well with the world.
No better UI/UX either way.
Best
-
That's what I thought. My contact seems to believe that the CEO is convinced that it DOES make a difference. I would think that Google would give preference over making the UX better - typing in www doesn't seem to do that. Just to be sure - non-www is better than www?
-
It doesn't matter which you use. When you set up the preferred domain in the search console (GWMT), if you set as www, it will resolve as www. If you set as non www it will resolve as that.
Either way, when you type in www if it is non www as preferred, you will land on the preferred domain.
Best
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
-
Do home page carry more seo benefit than other pages?
hi, i would like to include my kws in the URL and they are under 50 characters. is there anything in the algo that tells engines to give more importance to homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | alan-shultis0 -
What is the proper URL length? in seo
i learned that having 50 to 60 words in a url is ok and having less words is preferable by google. but i would like to know that as i am gonna include keywords in the urls and i am afraid it will increase the length. is it gonna slighlty gonna hurt me? my competitors have 8 characters domain url and keywords length of 13 and my site has 15 character domain url and keywords length of 13 which one will be prefered by google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | calvinkj0 -
Schema.org tricking and duplicate content across domains
I've found the following abuse, and Im curious what could I do about it. Basically the scheme is: own some content only once (pictures, description, reviews etc) use different domain names (no problem if you use the same IP or IP-C address) have a different layout (this is basically the key) use schema.org tricking, meaning show (the very same) reviews on different scale, show a little bit less reviews on one site than on an another Quick example: http://bit.ly/18rKd2Q
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sved
#2: budapesthotelstart.com/budapest-hotels/hotel-erkel/szalloda-attekintes.hu.html (217.113.62.21), 328 reviews, 8.6 / 10
#6: szallasvadasz.hu/hotel-erkel/ (217.113.62.201), 323 reviews, 4.29 / 5
#7: xn--szlls-gyula-l7ac.hu/szallodak/erkel-hotel/ (217.113.62.201), no reviews shown It turns out that this tactic even without the 4th step can be quite beneficial to rank with several domains. Here is a little investigation I've done (not really extensive, took around 1 and a half hour, but quite shocking nonetheless):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aqbt1cVFlhXbdENGenFsME5vSldldTl3WWh4cVVHQXc#gid=0 Kaspar Szymanski from Google Webspam team said that they have looked into it, and will do something, but honestly I don't know whether I could believe it or not. What do you suggest? should I leave it, and try to copy this tactic to rank with the very same content multiple times? should I deliberately cheat with markups? should I play nice and hope that these guys sooner or later will be dealt with? (honestly can't see this one working out) should I write a case study for this, so maybe if the tactics get bigger attention, then google will deal with it? Does anybody could push this towards Matt Cutts, or anybody else who is responsible for these things?0 -
Why do websites use different URLS for mobile and desktop
Although Google and Bing have recommended that the same URL be used for serving desktop and mobile websites, portals like airbnb are using different URLS to serve mobile and web users. Does anyone know why this is being done even though it is not GOOD for SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | razasaeed0 -
Does posting on Craigslist damage our SEO or reuptation?
We have a website that's a single person barbershop. She has been promoting on Craigslist, and that is outranking the website in the SERPs. However, the craigslist results showing up are actually expired and don't link to anything. They just seem to be cached by Craigslist. My question is, is Craigslist considered to generally not be a good avenue for directing inbound links for services on your site? Or is it a good strategy to use Craigslist to build link traffic for service businesses? I get mixed responses when I search for this. Thanks eYtdHtg.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smallpotatoes0 -
Is our sub-domain messing up our seo for our root?
We have a website (mysite.com) that we control and a subdomain (affiliate.mysite.com) that is 3rd-Party Content completely out of our control. I've found that nearly all or our Crawl Errors are coming from this subdomain. Same deal with 95% of our warnings: they all come from the subdomain. The two website are very much interlinked, as the subdomain serves up the header and footer of the root domain through iFrames and the 3rd-party content in the middle-section. On the root domain there are countless links pointing at this 3rd-party subdomain. How do these errors affect the root domain, and how do you propose we address the issue?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | opusbyseo0 -
Anybody have useful advice to fix a very bad link profile?
Hello fellow mozzers. I am interested in getting the communities opinion on how to fix an extremely bad link profile, or whether it would be easier to start over on a new domain. This is for an e-commerce site that sells wedding rings. Prior to coming to our agency, the client had been using a different service that was doing some serious black hat linkbuilding on a truly staggering scale. Of the roughly 53,000 links that show up in OSE, 16,500 of them have the anchor text "wedding rings", 1,300 "wedding ring sets", etc. For contrast, there are only two "visit website", and just one domain name anchor text. So it is about the farthest from natural you can get. Anyway, the site traffic was doing great until the end of February, when it took a massive hit and lost over half the day to day traffic volume, and steadily declined until April 24th (Penguin), when it took another huge hit and lost almost 70% of traffic from Google. Note that the traffic from Yahoo/Bing stayed the same. So the question is, is it worth trying to clean up this mess of a backlink profile or would it be smarter to start fresh with a new domain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CustomCreatives0 -
Could this have penalized our domain?
So I've been wracking my brain about a problem. I had posted earlier about our degrading rank that we haven't been able to arrest. I thought we were doing everything right. Many years ago we had a program that would allow other stores in our niche use our site as a storefront if they couldn't deal with setting up their own site. They would have their own homepage with their own domain but all links from that page would go to our site to avoid duplicate content issues (before I knew about canonical meta tags or before they existed, I don't remember). I just realize that we had dozens of these domains pointing to our site without nofollow meta tags. Is it possible that this pattern looked like we were trying to game Google and have been penalized as some kind of link farm since Panda? I've added nofollow meta tags to these domains. If we were being penalized for this, should this fix the problem?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IanTheScot0