Changing preferred domain
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My company has an international website, and because of a technical issue visitors in one of our main countries cannot visits the "www" version of our site.
Currently, the www version is our preferred domain - and the non www redirects to that page. To solve this problem, I was thinking of proposing the following and would greatly appreciate any feedback!
(Note: If you answered my www vs. non www question, thanks - this is a follow up)
1. Set non www site as the preferred version
2. Redirect from www to non www
3. Contact our current links and ask them to change to without “www”
4. Change canonical URLs to without “www”
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Way you propose is good if you can ask to change most of external links. If no, some link weight will be lost after redirect.
I can propose alternative decision. You can create special subdomain or folder for country with such issues. And redirect visitors by IP. Of course in this case you should use canonical to avoid duplicate content. In result you will have primary page URL in SERP, but all people from specific country will be redirected to working pages.
Cheers,
Vladimir
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