Switch to www from non www preference negatively hit # pages indexed
-
I have a client whose site did not use the www preference but rather the non www form of the url. We were having trouble seeing some high quality inlinks and I wondered if the redirect to the non www site from the links was making it hard for us to track.
After some reading, it seemed we should be using the www version for better SEO anyway so I made a change on Monday but had a major hit to the number of pages being indexed by Thursday. Freaking me out mildly.
What are people's thoughts? I think I should roll back the www change asap - or am I jumping the gun?
-
I agree 100% with Dan
You should essentially use all three big tools you can most likely find out using just two what the majority of the links point to.
Here is a great reason as to why you should care
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/7430/What-is-a-301-Redirect-and-Why-Should-You-Care.aspx
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
with one or both ( if it were my site I would want to see all the links pointing to it and how powerful they are so I would purchase one month of services from each or only only one the two below in addition to Moz open site Explorer simply because none of them have the entire link index)
If they point to the www.version of your domain then 301 redirect and remember to add the www.example.com and non-www- http://example.com
Using a 301 redirect discussed thoroughly in this link
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
&
this great guide
Then tell google you choice in Web Master tools
when you have found out which one has the most powerful relevant links pointing to it add both www. & no-www to Google webmaster tools and you can then select which one Google will index.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231
If its to close to call use marketing.grader.com to find out which one has more likes tweets and especially plus ones from Google because 301 redirects do not pass on social sharing you can use this as a tiebreaker.
Sincerely
Thomas
-
Hi Brigitte
To echo some of the other answer here, simply having www vs. non-www does not affect rankings at all directly. What matters is choosing one and keeping it consistent. This would mean consistent across;
- Internal links
- Always redirect from the non-preferred to the preferred
- Don't switch if you don't have to
- Try to get back links pointing at the preferred version
By the way, you need to register a separate google webmaster tools account for non-www (it is treated as a different website in terms of some of the data).
I would choose the version with the most backlinks pointing at it, honestly, and then keep it that way forever.
-Dan
-
First off if you are doing this just to assume that you will get more links because people type www.by default into a lot of things I would really not change it for that reason. It only reason I would change it is if you are going to introduce some sort of software like google page speed which needs a subdomain. Regardless first make sure that you have actually done at 301 redirect use this tool put in your URL
http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/
I would do return the site to how it was Unless you have good reason to believe that you actually acquire more links this way. Or you have more www. links pointing at your site.
I do not believe that it is the end of the world by any means, but I do not think that if you are having problems receiving links you are going to solve anything by adding at www.
You need to work on various white hat methods of gaining links.
Not changing around yours website architecture.
If you decide that you do want to add the www. Then by all means let Google know that your making a change by telling them that you are changing domains Inside of Google Webmaster tools.
I know you are not changing the domain however you want to treat it just like you Are That Way, Google will come back and index your site quite frequently a lot more than it would otherwise.
When you change your link structure treat it like a domain change.
http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
http://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/changes-of-domain/
It is going to take over 10% of your link juice away from anything going to the non-www. and add the same amount if you have a lot of powerful links going to www. it might be worth it.
But I still think you are looking in the wrong place for links.
Make sure your site is being indexed if you change it or if you do not.
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/indexation-problems-diagnosis-using-google-webmaster-tools/
Try press releases or other white hat methods.
all the best,
Thomas
-
There shouldnt be any problem with incoming links because of that.
As William said though, you will see some changes, but you will recover. Sometimes, it will take a long time to fully get Google to index the correct urls so don't jump the gun. Decide and stick with one.
-
You are basically 301 redirecting an entire site to a new URL (the "www" subdomain). So treat this like any other 301, you will dip, but it should recover for the most part.
In the future, I wouldn't recommend changing the www status after a suite is established, even if the preference changes.
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
-
Will noindex pages still get link equity?
We think we get link equity from some large travel domains to white label versions of our main website. These pages are noindex because they're the same URLs and content as our main B2C website and have canonicals to the pages we want indexed. Question is, is there REALLY link equity to pages on our domain which have "noindex,nofollow" on them? Secondly we're looking to put all these white label pages on a separate structure, to better protect our main indexed pages from duplicate content risks. The best bet would be to put them on a sub folder rather than a subdomain, yes? That way, even though the pages are still noindex, we'd get link equity from these big domains to www.ourdomain.com/subfolder where we wouldn't to subdomain.ourdomain.com? Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | HTXSEO0 -
Google analytics suddenly stopped tracking all my landing pages
Hey guys. I love the new update of GA. Looks so clean. So, of course, I was excited to see how my landing pages were doing. I went to behavior, all content, all pages. And I noticed it's only showing me 19 pages out of the 93 I have indexed. And none of the top ones at all! Can't find them anywhere in GA! Anyone seen this before? Thank you so much
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
Page Tracking using Custom URLs - is this viable?
Hi Moz community! I’ll try to make this question as easy to understand as possible, but please excuse me if it isn’t clear. Just joined a new team a few months ago and found out that on some of our most popular pages we use “custom URLs” to track page metrics within Google Analytics. NOTE: I say “custom URLs” because that is the best way for me to describe them. As an example: This page exists to our users: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Ram_HD/2012/photos-interior/ But this is the URL we have coded on the page: cars-trucks/used-cars/reviews/2012-Ram-HD/photos-interior/ (within the custom variance script labeled as “var l_tracker=” ) It is this custom URL that we use within GA to look up metrics about this page. This is just one example of many across our site setup to do the same thing Here is a second example: Available page to user: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Cadillac_ATS/2015/ Custom “var l_tracker=” /cars-trucks/2015-Cadillac-ATS/overview/ NOTE: There is a small amount of fear that the above method was implemented years ago as a work-around to a poorly structured URL architecture. Not validated, but that is a question that arose. Main Questions: Is the above implementation a normal and often used method to track pages in GA? (coming from an Omniture company before – this would not be how we handled page level tracking) Team members at my current company are divided on this method. Some believe this is not a proper implementation and are concerned that trying to hide these from Google will raise red flags (i.e. fake URLs in general = bad) I cannot find any reference to this method anywhere on the InterWebs - If method is not normal: Any recommendations on a solution to address this? Potential Problems? GA is currently cataloguing these tracking URLs in the Crawl Error report. Any concerns about this? The team wants to hide the URLs in the Robots.txt file, but some team members are concerned this may raise a red flag with Google and hurt us more than help us. Thank you in advance for any insight and/or advice. Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | usnseomoz0 -
How to set goal in Google Analytics that required specific page
So our company has new page that has just implemented (let say "page x" --> not a landing page) and we want to see how many visitors that through "page x " convert into the goal (let say "page y"). If I just make the goal destination like "/page y" the goal number that appear is ALL the visitors who reach "page y" (through or not through "page x"), so how I set the goal setting to only show the visitors who reach "page y" through "page x" ? Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | ddspg0 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js what is this link doing on my website?
Hello Expert, I am using google tag manager and google analytic is already configured in that now i just want to confirm when i do inspect element of my home page in that i can see this link - http://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js where as if i do view source of my page then it is not visible. so what is this link - www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js and what role it play? Do we really need this link to be present on website? Regards, Raghuvinder
Reporting & Analytics | | raghuvinder0 -
Moz Crawl shows over 100 times more pages than my site has?
The latest crawl stats are attached. My site has just over 300 pages? Wondering what I have done wrong? RRv3fR0
Reporting & Analytics | | Billboard20120 -
How do I find out how well a page converts in Analytics
Hello All, I am looking to find out how well a page converts in Analytics. A simple request you would thing, but no! First off let me list what I don't want to know: I don't want to know the conversion rate of a product I don't want to know the conversion rate based on the landing page What I want to know is how many people click to add the product to their basket on a particular page (which I understand is not strictly the conversion rate, but whatever). So the ways I have tried unsuccessfully are: The Analytics overlay (the in page Analytics thing) - this doesn't work because the "Add to Basket" button is not a link, it is an input. The Navigation Summary - this doesn't work because most of the time the /shopping_cart.php URL doesn't come up in the short list, and if you search for the URL in the search box beneath the percentages get all skewed. The most obvious solution would be Event tracking but I can't get that implemented in the short term. So does anyone have the answer to this most curious of conundrums? Thanking you in advance, Rich
Reporting & Analytics | | tonyatfat0