Bought a site with wordpress - www vs. non-www seo problem

Hello,

I just bought a large site that is build on wordpress. I am moving the site to my server and I have noticed that the guy that owned it used the non-www option. But all the links to the site are with www option and front page is indexed as www in google, all the other pages are as not www.

What would you do? Would you change settings in WP to www mode?? I would do it, but I am afraid site would drop in search engine positioning if I change permalink structure (had bad experience before with changing internal structure of webpage, I lost rankings on some other site).

Does the www vs. non-www even play a big role?

Thanks for all replys, reps given!

 

I dont believe that it makes a big difference as regards rankings, although i did read something a while back that mentioned that you could configure the .htaccess file in someway to insure that www was always indexed, which apparently meant that any PR related to the non www would pass to the www.

Ive never tried that so im not sure. hopefully someone else here might know.

 

I did once and it dropped from the SEs for a while, later it came back, but I had a 2 month or so break .

 

Just leave the site the way it is if you have any doubts. www. and no www are the same, the only thing that it would effect is the page rank.

 

Wrong, they are treated as separate by Google and I believe by the other SEs as well.

Personally I would change it as all link juice will flow to one but don't blame me if you take that route and something happens

 

I would go for the long term solution and make sure all your PR was targeted towards one or the other unless making a major change is to put you in the poor house.

Brandon

 

there is wordpress plugin called "Permanent Link Redirect" . I dont remember the url but i'm sure that if you google that term , you can find it.

it can help you.

 

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Code (markup):

Use that in htaccess if you wish. It will redirect all non www to www.

 

Exactly what I was thinking. Thanks all for your thoughts, reps were given!

 

It's called Canonicalization. Here's an explanation from Matt Cutts.

You will notice different PR values between the two. This also effects http vs https, although Matt didn't mention this specifically.

 

Here's just the plugin you need.