Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Naked domain redirection info
-
Hi Guys
Been reading one or two posts about 'naked domains' v the 'www' derivative and was wondering...
- What is your opinion on this, is there a definitive benefit to your business in making the switch in terms of ranking?
- Apart from the Google released info, do you have any further recommended reading on this subject matter?
Thanks in advance
Daren
-
The naked domain gives an extra room for your permalink to be more visible on SERPs thus making some extra keywords visible instead of being chopped off. So it has an SEO benefit for people who are habitual with creating long-tailed keywords inside permalinks.
If you think shorter is better, then the non-WWW approach will make you feel better. There are apparently no “technical” benefits to using the non-WWW approach, only that it reduces redundancy and is no longer needed. To be practical, it makes no drastic change whether to use a naked domain or domain with www as the sub-domain. A domain which is hosted at the root directory like www, is better remembered by people as a brand. People are habitual to recognizing websites with www extension and are observed browsing sites in address bar using the www extension most frequently.
The following advanatages you may get from it-
Ability to restrict cookies when using multiple subdomains.
-
Using the WWW hostname allows for easy segregation in the file tructure of your website.
-
More flexibility with DNS.
However, my preferrence is always to use WWW
You can ready further guide on this page: http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/www-vs-non-www-for-your-canonical-domain-url-which-is-best-and-why/
-
-
This is hugely dependent upon what you want to do. There is certainly no outright SEO benefit to doing this.
Personally, I don't like naked domains and much prefer the www. version.
Have a read of this to see if you can gain any additional information.
-Andy
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
-
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
After HTTPS upgrade, should I change all internal links, or a general 301 redirect is better?
I recently upgraded to https. Of course most internal links of my old posts are still http. So I set up a 301 redirect in order to make the old link works. In terms od SEO this is good or it is better to update all the internal links to https, manually? In that case can I do it in batch with a search/replace command in the phmyadmin database? any other suggested method? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | micvitale0 -
My main domain is missing in google, subdomain appears instead.
I have two SEO optimised pages in my website targeting different keywords www.example.com <-- main selling page (Pocket Guitar | Guitar Instruments)
On-Page Optimization | | kevinbp
www.example.com/index/ <-- 2nd selling page (Guitar Australia | Guitar Perth) Q: At first my website "www.example.com" is ranking on google first page. Suddenly it disappears and the link "www.example.com/index/" appears instead. No matter what i search, "Pocket Guitar | Guitar Instruments | Guitar Australia | Guitar Perth", the link www.example.com/index/ appears on the front page instead of www.example.com. What is happening to my main domain? Should i be worried?0 -
How long should I leave an existing web page up after a 301 redirect?
I've been reading through a few of blog posts here on moz and can't seem to find the answer to these two questions: How long should I leave an existing page up after a 301 redirect? The page old page is no longer needed but has pretty high page authority. If I take the old page down—the one that I'm redirecting from—immediately after I set up the 301 redirect, will link juice still be passed to the new page? My second question is, right now, on my index.html page I have both a 301 redirect and a rel canonical tag in the head. They were both put in place to redirect and pass link equity respectively. I did this a couple years back after someone recommended that I do both just to be safe, but from what I've gathered reading the articles here on moz is that your supposed to pick one or the other depending on whether or not it's permanent. Should I remove the rel conanical tag or would it be better to just leave it be?
On-Page Optimization | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Is .PW domain is good for SEO?
I want to register .PW domain which has recently got live to register. I am in doubt should it is good for SEO or not.
On-Page Optimization | | semmediapvtltd0 -
How long is too long for domain URL length?
I noticed one of the negatively correlated ranking factors was length of URL. I'm building a page from scratch, we are trying to rank for 'Minneapolis Fitness' and 'Minneapolis Massage'. Is www.minnnepolismassageandfitness.com just ridiculously long? Or does the exact match outweigh the penalty for URL length?
On-Page Optimization | | JesseCWalker2 -
Landing Pages: New Domain or Sub Folder?
I use premise for landing pages. I have some extra domain names that are fantastic in my industry. I'm wondering if I should use those domains for these landing pages? The header, nav, footer, would be the same as my main site, the body and content would be totally different. will google penalize me if I have the same header and footer on a landing page?
On-Page Optimization | | homebizsmart0 -
My Domain Name - short vs relevant
I'm creating a website for my new web design company in Vancouver. I'm looking to target such keywords as "Web Design Vancouver", etc. I have another company with a hyphenated domain name which is terrible when I'm on the phone and my client asks me for my domain (hard to say, always spelling it out). Also I wanted to have a good snappy name for my new business so I found a 6 letter .com and matching .ca for my company. My question is: is it best to use a short domain name or is it better have my keywords in the domain name? eg. xyz.com vs xyzvancouverwebdesign.com Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | VebianWebandMobileDevelopment0