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.
Domain prefix changed, will this impact SEO?
-
Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change.
Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up.
Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed?
Thanks
-
Thanks Ryan. It seems the results are already starting to reappear which is quicker than I expected. Our web development company should have definitely consulted us before making this change but at least there's no major issue now. Thanks again.
-
Hi Georgina. Having pages go missing after a redirect change is fairly typical for a given time period but they should come back eventually, minus any normal fluctuations associated with rankings. You can do a few things to check on your progress, such as site:YOURDOMAIN.com searches with the addition of inurl:SPECIFIC.STRING to try and find certain sections or products. Cheers!
-
Hi Ryan. Further to my original question, we've noticed some of the products we were appearing high for in the SERPS have now vanished. Although some are still showing. I assume this would be temporary whilst they are being reindexed. Should we be worried? The Web company did this without any warning.
-
Life saver, I have made the changes you have suggested. Thanks very much for your help.
-
Hi Georgina. This could definitely have an impact but since it's a more minimal change (root domain is remaining the same) hopefully it will be mitigated (or very minimal) since the 301 redirect was used. Something else you can do though is go to Google Webmaster Tools, verify ownership of both the www and non-www and set the non-www as your preferred domain within that tool. The same can be done within Bing as well. In addition you can update your sitemaps by uploading them there so that they include the non-www links as the target pages. This should help speed things up and make the change over less pronounced. Cheers!
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
-
Spammers created bad links to old hacked domain, now redirected to our new domain. Advice?
My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links. Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there. The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com". 😞 Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Technical SEO | | usDragons0 -
Will Adding Publish Date at end of Page Title for Blog posts Hurt SEO?
I'd like to be able to easily track blog posts by month but in Google reports when you set a date range obviously older blog post still appear and with amount of blog posts we generate without seeing the date in the title it's not obvious what was published and when it was published. For example if a Blog Title was "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15 would it hurt SEO? The reason is I'd like to have a quick way to know how new posts do each month compared to older content
Technical SEO | | inhouseninja0 -
Blocked jquery in Robots.txt, Any SEO impact?
I've heard that Google is now indexing links and stuff available in javascript and jquery. My webmastertools is showing that some links are blocked in robots.txt of jquery. Sorry I'm not a developer or designer. I want to know is there any impact of this on my SEO? and also how can I unblock it for the robots? Check this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/3VDWikC.png
Technical SEO | | hammadrafique0 -
SEO-impact of mouseover text on header pictures
Hi, what do you reckon of taking away the mouseover effect on the header pictures seen on www.viventura.de/reisen/peru?
Technical SEO | | viventuraSEO
We are thinking of eliminating the mouseover text to make User Experience even better but are worrying that our ranking might go down when doing so. Any experiences, any help is highly appreciated!
Thanks, Benno0 -
My .htaccess has changed, what do i do to avoid it again...?
Hello Today i notice that our site did not auto changed from without www to with, when i checked the .htaccess file i notice # in-front of each line and i know we did not insert it in there, after i removed it it worked fine. The only changes that we did recently was to a mobile version to the site but the call to autodirect is in a JS and not in the .htaccess, could it be the server..? is there any way that anything else might cause this...? The site is HTML and WP could it be because of that...? Thank's Simo
Technical SEO | | Yonnir0 -
Do Domain Extensions such as .com or .net affect SEO value?
In the beginning of SEO days, it was going around that .com is the best for SEO and that .net is not as good. Is there any truth to this, and what about .org or .edu? I always hear that .edu sites have high PR. Is there any rhyme or reason to this, or all they all equal? Thank you, Afshin Christian-Way.com
Technical SEO | | applesofgold0 -
Subdomain and Domain Rankings
I have read here that domain names with keywords might add a boost to your search rank For instance using a completely inane example monkey-fights.com might get a boost compared to mfl.com (monkey fighting league) when searching for "monkey fights" There seems to be a hot debate as to how much bonus the first domain might get over the second, but leaving that aside for the moment. Question 1. Would monkey-fights.mfl.com get the same kind of bonus as a root domain bonus? Question 2. If the answer to 1 above was yes would a 301 redirect from the suddomain URL to root domain URL retain that bonus I was just thinking on how hard it is to get root domains these days that are not either being squatted on etc. and if this might be a way to get the same bonus, or maybe subdomains are less bonus prone and so it would be a waste of time Thanks
Technical SEO | | bThere0 -
Changing DNS -- SEO implications?
Hey Moz, We're migrating an old site on an old server over to a new server/DNS. The plan is to keep the same URL structure and reuse our existing URL's. As long as we make minimal changes to each page's content, we should be able to update our DNS entry and get all the pages recreated and assigned to their correct URLs without any reduction in SEO rankings. Is this correct? This site gets a lot of organic traffic and ranks highly on some challenging keywords, so it's key that we retain our rankings as much as possible. I've read that it's wise to lower the DNS time-to-live to one hour, about a day before the move, to help Google crawl the DNS a little quicker. Are there any other recommendations you guys can offer or past experiences?
Technical SEO | | stephen_reply0