Homepage 301 Redirect SEO Question

[James R]

Hi there,

 

Quick question: Should I have my homepage redirecting from http://myhomepage.com to http://www.myhomepage.com? Is having it accessible at both urls damaging from an SEO perspective?

[Kerm]

Must be only with or w/o

[Guest]

James R, at one time some believed it was an issue in that because WWW is actually a subdomain of youdomain.com that the engines might punish you for duplicate content. That is not an issue with the way todays search engines work. However, links to your website are still important and I find that you can’t always control how someone will link to you. Some may link WWW some may not. If you do not use a redirect you may be dividing the strength of your inbound links between two urls. If you redirect to one or the other, then all inbound links will be linked to just one url.

 

No one really knows how search engines work, but this is what I believe. Besides, redirecting to one version of your url is still the best way to not waste server resources having bots index duplicate uri’s.

[James R]

Thanks for the replies guys!

 

B Dalton, cool I'm sold. So I take it I'll have to edit my htaccess file. Does this look like the right code to use:

 

 

Canonical issues: www vs. non-www

 

There's been much talk about canonical issues and search engines. This is where both the www and non-www versions of your pages are listed in a search engine. This is said to possibly trigger a duplicate content penalty and/or split page rank. If this is of concern to you, you may wish to use the following, but be aware that you may suffer a further loss of traffic while the engines sort out what's what. This example is where you wish to direct all non-www traffic to www. Add the following to your .htaccess file.

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

 

Ensure that all your links to folders always end in a trailing / if there is no filename after that link.

[Guest]

Looks good.

[James R]

Worked perfectly!

[Don Camillo]

Many Thanks! it works perfect. Its so easy, why didnt I do this earlier.........

 

Just open your .htacces file in notepad++ and at the end add: (and of course change it to your site)

 

 

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$

http://www.yoursite.com/$1[L,R=301]

Edited July 10, 2012 by Don Camillo (see edit history)

[colin7291]

wouldn't say rankings will be completely lost, but it would depend on your niche and how competitive your search terms are that you rank for, so a simply yes or no answer doesn't really fit your questions without some more details.

 

Generally rankings will decrease for a change of domains due to the new domain not having the links or authority etc that the old/current domain has, but if your not in a competitive market and/or have a relatively new site/domain to start with, your rankings shouldn't be effect to dramatically due to not having much to lose in the first place.

 

Any sort of change in domain or url has a risk of losing rankings though, so you need to gage if the change is worth the risk as you will loss link juice even with the correct 301 redirects in place and doing a change of address in google WMT.

 

So the question stands:

1. Why do you want to change domain names?

1. Is it worth the risk of having to basically start fresh?

 

Thankyou !!!

Best Regards .