Hey guys, I notice my website doesn't have www. in front of it, even on googles search engine it shows up as: website.com rather than www,website.com Can anyone shine me in? Thanks!
Nope, it does not affect in serp rankings, but may affect while distributing PR, Because generally people are building link with www not without www. and with www. is recommended to use. if your website is not being redirect, do 301 permenant redirection for it.
Thanks for your reply Shed, I've added a 301 permenant redirection and it still shows up website.com, how do I get the www back?
also try to set Preferred Domain setting in your Google webmaster account , you will able to set your site with www in google webmaster account and just wait for next updation. after that google will set your site with www. Thanks John
It doesn't matter, but you should define in your .htaccess if your domain should always shown (and indexed) with www. or without. In case some people link to you with and some without the www. this could mean duplicate content that could hurt your site without the proper .htaccess settings.
Google sees both as the same and not as duplicate content. However, as a previous poster stated, you can set your default subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools, and Google will honor your preference.
Uhm, no. Google treats them as separate pages, in other words, it treats example.com and www.example.com as separate pages, just like it treats example.com/index.html and www.example.com/index.html as separate pages as well. Which of course can and does trigger duplicate content issues, especially when you link to one version in your site and the people linking back to you link to another version. That's why the 301 redirect is so important.
Oh wow so confused lol, it's just that I spent 3 months on creating back links with www. then I switched my website to a php blog and somehow it turned into website.com. I think I should leave it cause every time I try to change it, it screws up my website all together.
It is a bad thing to change your cms. This always damage your traffic. I hope this be the last time you changed
There's nothing wrong with changing a content management system as long as you make sure that all the links remain the same or are redirected to their new locations if they do change. That's all.
From my experience it doesn't hurt at all, I have my domainname.com and my domainname.co.nz both with and without the www, and all links, backlinks, PR are the same, even for the .com vs .co.nz (New Zealand domain name) There is a place in googles webmaster tools that you can choose which one you prefer if you are really interested. Cheers Lynny
Google does treat them separetly, of course once the user clicks on the result it will take them to the same page, because your DNS will translate to the correct IP. Being constant is important. Choose one way to link build and keep it.
Thats not a matter......... There is an option in google webmastre tool to change these issue thank you
I would keep it the way it is. I don't know about anyone else, but i stopped typing in www a long time ago. takes too much time and it is not necessary.
Dan, I tried that once on a site that had excellent rankings in Google. I changed the CMS and set up the redirects from the old urls to the new urls. The site had 30+ keywords on page one of the search results, and after the change, all of my listings dropped to page five of the search results. It killed my business overnight. Bill
That doesn't mean anything by itself. Was the content structure the same between systems, or was there a major shift? That's the only other thing that could really affect rankings like that - and is something I should have included in my prior post.
The page content did not change at all. The only change was the cms and therefore the url. I changed the site from a perl engine to a php engine.