Www vs non www and understanding opensite
-
Hi Guys,
New guy here with some questions regarding the difference between www and non www.
I am helping with a site at the moment and gradually working my way through bits and learning all the time. I was watching one of the seomoz videos and it brought my attention back to www vs non www.
I understand that google will treat these as two seperate sites but wanted to check what the stats are telling me.
I was under the impression that www.mydummysite.com was getting most links etc as this is what I have always used. However when I used Opensite explorer it told me something different as follows:
32/100 29/100 5 16
32/100 29/100 2 1,500
Am i correct in saying that i should be adding a redirect from www.mydummysite.com to mydummysite.com ???? I am thinking that this is telling me that I am potentially missing out on 1,500 links to my site but it could mean I am missing out on just 16. Eitherway I guess its something I should fix right?
Do I just redirect that page or would all pages beneith it such as mydummysite.com/news also need redirect???
Can i use Canonical Rel links for this now?
Thanks for taking the time to read and reply!
-
Excellent, thank you for taking the time to come back to me.
(*note for the admin... just tried to reply to this via my HTC Desire and clicking this text box does not bring up the keypad on the phone. Not sure if this is a phone issue or the site not being recognised as a text box.)
-
My recommendation is....ignore everything and decide which URL version you prefer and go with that. Why? Because you have less then 10 linking domains and, in the long term, your site should grow and hopefully end up with hundreds of linking domains.
Also consider, you lose only a small amount of link juice (estimated between 1-10%) when you redirect a link. Of course you don't want to lose any, but you only have a few links and hopefully you will grow to many thousands.
The moz rank and trust factors will adjust after your URLs are redirected. Consolidating your linking power is the primary reason why this issue needs to be addressed.
If I was in your situation I would choose the "www" domain and update the links on your company's website. If you wish to go with the "non-www" site, that is perfectly fine as well. The important factor is that you make a decision, not which one you make.
-
Great that was what i thought also which means I am learning!
The 1500 links are coming from another site owned by the company and I was going to say that the Linking Root domains are higher on the www site so I would probably go with that. However, I just check the Full List of Link Metrics and it shows :
Moz Rank 3.86
Moz Trust 5.59
Moz Rank 4.49
Moz Trust 5.68
Am i therefore correct in saying that mydummysite.com would be the better one to go with?
Sorry for the silly quesions, your help is appreciated. Its nearly 12pm here I should go to bed!
-
If those were 1500 links from 150 domains, I would definitely chose the URL version that was receiving those links. Since those links are only from 2 domains, they don't really weigh that much.
Who are the 1500 links from? Based on the information you shared it seems most likely those links are either from another site you control, or someone who is very friendly with your site. In either case, it should be a simple matter to update those links.
Your site's ranking on any given keyword can possibly change with any change you make to your site. There are too many unknown variables to even take a guess, other then for me to say I wouldn't expect this change to have any immediate impact to your rankings.
-
Thanks for reply Ryan.
That helps a lot.
Am i correct in saying that I should select the site with 1500 links? Seems like an obvious question.
I guess I am really trying to work out whether my current site rank and position can be improved on with a simple change and understanding the stats.
-
Hi Wayne.
The first step is for you to decide which version of your site is preferred, the "www" or "non-www" version. You are correct in checking existing links to your site and using this information as a factor in making a decision.
The 2 / 1500 figure for your mydummysite.com URL shows there are 2 domains which offer 1500 links to your site. I am going to guess that these are your sites, and you have a footer link or something similar which shows up on every page of the site.
If these links are under your control, you can update them to the "www" version of your site if that is what you preferred. Ultimately you need to make a decision one way or the other, and then stick with it.
The next step would be placing a redirect on your webserver to all traffic is redirected to your chosen domain. If you chose www.mydummysite.com, then whenever you enter "mydummysite.com" the address should automatically be changed to www.mydummysite.com once the redirect has been correctly set up. You can use seomoz.org as an example of how that should work.
The method of redirecting your site will vary based on software (such as Microsoft vs Linux servers) and hardware (such as Apache vs Lightspeed servers). If you are not familiar with how to make this change, contact your web host and they should be able to assist you.
This is a very common change which can easily be made. The single redirection will work for your entire site once it is properly configured. You could use canonical tags as well, but the 301 redirect process mentioned above would be the best solution.
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
-
Non Published Wordpress Pages
Hi, Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published. Can it like slow the site down or does it not matter? Someone in my dept. has so many pages started/not complete and besides being messy, I wonder if it has any negative impact on the site. Thanks
Technical SEO | | aua1 -
301 redirect to WWW on a 2 year old website with good SERPs and organic traffic?
Hi everyone, Recently someone pointed out that my website can be accessed in both ways i.e. by typing www.example.com or example.com. He further added that Google might identify this as duplicate content and penalize my website. So now I'm thinking about 301 redirection from non WWW to WWW using htaccess method. But my website is 2 year old now and I'm getting some decent traffic from Google. Will this redirection have an adverse effect on my rankings? Is there any other way to resolve this issue? I don’t want to lose my current rankings or organic traffic. Any help would be very much appreciated. P.S. Currently Google index my website pages with WWW.
Technical SEO | | nicksharma040 -
Can Anybody Understand This ?
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
These days I'm reading the paperwork from sergey brin and larry which is the first paper of Google.
And I dont get the Ranking part which is: "Google maintains much more information about web documents than typical search engines. Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information. Additionally, we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence. First, consider the simplest case -- a single word query. In order to rank a document with a single word query, Google looks at that document's hit list for that word. Google considers each hit to be one of several different types (title, anchor, URL, plain text large font, plain text small font, ...), each of which has its own type-weight. The type-weights make up a vector indexed by type. Google counts the number of hits of each type in the hit list. Then every count is converted into a count-weight. Count-weights increase linearly with counts at first but quickly taper off so that more than a certain count will not help. We take the dot product of the vector of count-weights with the vector of type-weights to compute an IR score for the document. Finally, the IR score is combined with PageRank to give a final rank to the document. For a multi-word search, the situation is more complicated. Now multiple hit lists must be scanned through at once so that hits occurring close together in a document are weighted higher than hits occurring far apart. The hits from the multiple hit lists are matched up so that nearby hits are matched together. For every matched set of hits, a proximity is computed. The proximity is based on how far apart the hits are in the document (or anchor) but is classified into 10 different value "bins" ranging from a phrase match to "not even close". Counts are computed not only for every type of hit but for every type and proximity. Every type and proximity pair has a type-prox-weight. The counts are converted into count-weights and we take the dot product of the count-weights and the type-prox-weights to compute an IR score. All of these numbers and matrices can all be displayed with the search results using a special debug mode. These displays have been very helpful in developing the ranking system. "0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
SEO Terms for Internal Vs External
Hey there! I am writing up an SEO plan for our company and wanted to get the groups input on the use of some SEO terms. I need to organize and explain these efforts to nonSEO people. I usually talk about, SEO in terms of "Internal" vs "External" efforts. Internal SEO efforts being things like Title Tags, Description Tags, Page Speed, Minimizing errors, proper 301 redirect, content development for the site, internal linking and anchor, etc. External SEO efforts being things like Link building, social media profile setups and posts (FB Twitter Pinterest, YouTube), PR work. How do you split these out? What terms do you use? Do you subdivide these tasks? What terms do you use? For example, with Internal, I sometimes talk about "Technical SEO" that has do to with making sure that site speed is working well, 301s are setup correctly, noindex tag etc are all used properly. These are things that different versus "On Page" efforts to use keywords properly etc. I will also use the term "Site Visibility" for non SEOs to explain the technical impact. For example, if your site has the wrong robots.txt, if you have 500 errors everywhere and a slow site, if you are sending spiders down a daisy chain of 301s, it is difficult for the key parts of your site to be found and so your "Visibility" to the engines are poor. You have to get your visibility up, before you begin to then worry about if you have the right keywords on a page etc. Any input or references would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Problem? Use no follow with paid advertisers ? Or Duplicate site www.
I recently changed some content and added a few advertisers on my real estate site. then ... my traffic stopped! I thought it was possible duplicate indexpage.. can I just redirect index.html? I read the post about link dillution from today. The a site cape cod realtor.co since adding a few sponsors I noticed I lost some rank especiall for key word cape cod realtor. Im not showing in top 100 anymore with big "G" and I was #4. It also removed my G places rank I was #4 .. I shop 40 links in bing nothing in google that I can see from mozilla tool... thanks- J
Technical SEO | | Capecod0 -
Permanent 301 redirects vs canonical urls?
Im moving a website that was .php to wordpress with a few static HTML pages. Which is better use permanent 301 redirects and delte the old pages, leave the old pages and use canonical urls and 301 redirects or something else?
Technical SEO | | senith0 -
Understanding No Follow
We manage a couple of sites with 100s of pages... Most of the sites have content that is not helpful as landing pages but obviously has relevent content related to our desired search terms. Some of links go off site to another domain. I am trying to understand the issue of "link juice" and if I gain it or lose it by putting "nofollow" designation on some of the page links. Specifically, do I increase the value of my pages if I put no follow tags on lower tier links off of these pages. Here is a page in question - http://www.vahmarketing.com/product/ductless-hoods Is there a best practice or SEO rule for using "no follow"? Thanks, Bob Nance
Technical SEO | | impressem0