Is the www and non www isue realy seen by Google as duplicate content?
-
I realy don't understand how Google could posibly devaluate a link because the site displays the same content with www and without www. I mean did somebody recently saw a devaluation of a domain because of this isue? I somehow can not belive this because it is the standard when geting a new webspace that the new website display the same content with and without www.
Is a redirect realy necessary?
-
Google maay be able to work out what version you want to go with, but is it the same one that bing and other SE's will go with, and then you have the problem with www and non www links, one will be redirect to the other somehow and will leak a bit of link juice. its better that when some one copies your url its always the same.
I prefer the non www. because www is unessasry, i believe its an old unix thing, not needed today. If you have a long domain name www makes it just that much more confusing
-
Google is very good at figuring out that www and non www versions are the same site - so content duplication will not be an issue (this happens too often for them not to handle properly). One advantage you do have is consolidation of yoru link juice towards the same canonical version and therefore achieving better results. Set your preference in Google Webmaster Tools to a choice and stick to it - everywhere - even in your email signatures and printed material.
As far as www goes we've purposely dropped it and went with non-www, I personally think www is silly and meaningless however this means we have to from time to time police and correct how webmasters write down and link our URL and ask for www removal if found. Not too hard if you monitor yoru brand via Google Alerts.
-
Better have www. instead of without. Uniformity has always been an issue
-
Hi Michael,
Now a days Google is really Google at figuring out what version of the website you want to go with but with that said, isn't really that hard of a thing to fix. I'd say that as long as all your internal links are consistent in pointing to the same version, then you shouldn't have anything to worry about. In the long run of things, by making the redirect you won't see this huge bump in rankings but it is a standard practice that is done.
Casey
-
better safe then sorry.
I did look around for some time to get the answer to the same question and since no one could get a straight answer and even google webmaster tool has the option for ww or non www I think is better to get the 301 redirect.
Anyway - is just an opinion.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
I have an eCommerce Site with in some cases, 100s of versions of the same product. How do I avoid "duplicate content" without writing literally 100s of unique product descriptions for the exact same product?
For instance, one item where the only difference is the Sports Team Logo is different, etc... or It comes in a variety of color Variants. I'm using Shopify.
On-Page Optimization | | pstone291 -
Duplicate content issue, across site domains (blogging)
Hi all, I've just come to learn that a client has been cross-posting their blog posts to other blogs (on higher quality domains, in some cases). For example - this is the same post on 3 different blogs. http://thebioethicsprogram.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
On-Page Optimization | | ketanmv
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2014/06/29/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/06/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experimentand-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing.html
And, sometimes a 4th time, on an NPR website. I'm assuming this is doing no one any favors and Harvard or NPR is going to earn the rank most every time. I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree? Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog? They are going to move their Wordpress Blog to hosting on their real domain soon:
http://www.bioethics.uniongraduatecollege.edu/news/ The current set up is not adding any value to their domain. Thank you for any advice! Ketan0 -
How much content does Google Crawl on your site?
Hi, We've had a debate around the office where some people believe that Google only crawls the first 150-200 words on a page and some people believe that they priority content that is above the fold and other people believe that all content has the same priority. Can you help us? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | mdorville
Matt0 -
Static content VS Dynamic changing content
We have collected a lot of reviews and we want to use them on our Categories pages. We are going to be updating the top 6 reviews per categories every 4 days. There will be another page to see all of the reviews. Is there any advantage to have the reviews static for 1 or 2 weeks vs. having unique new ones pulled from the data base every time the page is refreshed? We know there is an advantage if we keep them on the page forever with long tail; however, we have created a new page with all of the reviews they can go to.
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Duplicate Page Title
Wordpress Category pagination causes duplicate page title errors (ie. when there are so many posts in the category, it paginates them), is this a problem? Your tool is reporting it as a problem... but ProPhoto (my Wordpress provider say it is not a problem). Here are the 2 URL's with the same page title: http://www.lisagillphotography.co.uk/category/child-photography/ http://www.lisagillphotography.co.uk/category/child-photography/page/2/
On-Page Optimization | | LisaGill0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Duplicate Page Title
Hi All, I'm new in SEOMoz and have some questions after I have already spend 2-3 days trying to resolve the problems identified from Crawling one of my clients websites. I get quite a lot of Duplicate Page Conntent and Page Titles warnings and trying to find a workaround through the forums and posts. I continuously get this error on most of my pages: URL: http://domain.com/benefits with the same Page but with a WWW in front URL: http://www.domain.com/benefits Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thanks, Athos
On-Page Optimization | | athosk0 -
Tools for finding duplicate content offsite?
Hi is there a tool that will spider my site then find similar text on external sites?
On-Page Optimization | | adamzski0 -
Website Content
Is it bad to have html pages on a blog? I converted a completely HTML site to wordpress, but havd hundreds of article pages that are still html.
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0