Adding WWW before domain name

[success druggy]

Hello friends,

I have keyword rank of some keywords within 20, but the link of my blog posts on that keywords will show without WWW. I added WWW after 3 months.

Does these changing affect my keyword ranking after crawling ?

 

[Hassan]

You can add a redirect using .htaccess changes wont affect keyword ranking.

 

[success druggy]

success druggy

I have a wordpress blog, so .htaccess method don't work. I changed the domain in the settings. My Keyword rankings were affected by this.

 

[elcidofaguy]

Hello friends,

I have keyword rank of some keywords within 20, but the link of my blog posts on that keywords will show without WWW. I added WWW after 3 months.

Does these changing affect my keyword ranking after crawling ?

Hi Success Druggy,

You need to add the canonicalization tag to that page which tells G and other search engines which version of the page should be credited with link juice e.g. with www or without www prefix... This will solve your problem as well as backlinks to either www or without www being consolidated - so you'll consolidate the link juice for that page hence strengthening it...

The canonicalization tag needs to be placed within the head of your html file (you can also use plugins like all-in-one seo or yoast etc if using WP or similar for other CMS):

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mywebsite.com" />

for the above that means that the www. prefix is credited...

You can read more about this here...

Note: In addition by default for CMS's such as WP - you set whether its www. or without for the entire site with regards to navigation within settings (or you can do it via htaccess for other types of sites) - but do note that this is different to canonicalization as you also need this for link juice consolidation...

Hope that helps,

Cheers,

Sid

 

[Inquestor]

For me I make it a rule of thumb to add www. to domains/websites. This way it is less confusing plus I think it looks better.

However, my only exception would be for one word websites, I wouldn't add www. That's just me

 

[jonathan85]

jonathan85

Yeah it will look fine for a word domain without www. But it is not standardate for somethings that I don't know

Google.com's adding WWW before their domain for all. We should learn according google's way?

 

[Hassan]

You people missing important point here for example

www.domain.com
domain.com/
www.domain.com/index.html
domain.com/home.asp

These are same in your eyes but technically these are different urls A web server could return completely different content for these urls. Search engines treat www and non www version same url ie subdomain but two different websites There’s a risk of duplicate content. Set up a permanent redirection from one version to the other.

 

[richadrverma]

Two way to keep your site safe from Google Penalty Either add canonical tag in each page OR use 301 redirect code in htaccess file of your website.

 

[Hassan]

You need to put Following code in .htaccess

#Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.COM/$1 [R=301,L]

And Notifying Google About the Change in Webmaster Tool.