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I am about to manually submit a website url to the google search console to be indexed. I will like to know if there will be a major difference between adding the www along with my url (http://www.example.com) as apposed to just submitting the domain name (http://example.com).
I have read the google guidelines and watched a few of their search-console videos but they didn't mention anything about the importance of the www.
Do i gain or loose anything from including or excluding the www from my URL when submitting it to the google search console for indexing?
Can anyone help me on this issue?
Your help is much appreciated.
Best Regards.
To your question. I personally think the only distinct difference I can think of is that a potential consumer that would visit your website will be more used to seeing www. instead of just purely http://domain.com
I would recommend you opt for http://www.domain.com, besides that there will not be any difference in SEO Value.
There is no difference in submitting www vs non-www version. The only thing you should be care about is that only one version is actual. You should choose the domain name for your website and put a 301 Moved Permanently redirect at other name.
It is very important to have only one copy of your content. Duplicated content is penalized by Google and if you have your website open at domain.com and www.domain.com then this instantly creates duplicated content of all pages of your website.
The second thing you should do before submitting your website is to create a sitemap. From my experience when a site has a sitemap google index it much faster.
You should also review all titles, meta descriptions and other SEO issues. I would recommend to check your whole website for SEO issues with some SEO crawler. Try screaming frog if you want to test from your local computer or use online service like https://seocharger.com to check online. You can even set up SEO monitoring there.
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This one has me boggled, can't seem to find any answers.
I recently went ahead with an SSL license for my domain and as such, now use site-wide HTTPS.
I've set up a rewrite rule that 301 redirects any persons coming from a HTTP link to the new version. All of this is working fine.
My question is... what happens now in regards to Google rankings? The original site is up there (Ie, www.domain.com) albeit using HTTP, though clicking the link fixes that obviously.
Except Googlebot is evidently unable to crawl this version now because it reads the redirect.
Since Google is unable to crawl (and I'm assuming other search engines also), will this swiftly descend into oblivion in terms of search rankings? Will it simply update next-crawl to use the HTTPS. Or, the route I'm currently taking, will I need to start over by setting up the HTTPS version in Webmaster Tools and change as many external links elsewhere as I can?
Where would I stand taking this route if I could no longer fund the SSL license and had to revert back? Same process?
Thanks in advance!
The 301 redirect will tell Google your URLs have changed and to associate the old URLs with the New URLs (and to carry over all of the link juice, etc). It will take some time for Google to get caught up with the changes and as with any significant change you may see (significant) fluctuations in your pages' rankings. However, this is normal and you should not change anything.
If you change back to non-SSL pages the same process would apply.
I have 3 domains
these 2
http://www.janhendrikx.be
http://www.standenbouw-jan.be
redirect to
http://www.ontwerpbureaujan.be/
In google webmasters I added ontwerpbureaujan
Do I have to add the others too? Or do I get duplicate content
Do I have to use canonical URLs? How?
'Standenbouw' is my main seo keyword, maybe I should add http://www.standenbouw-jan.be to webmasters, not ontwerpbureaujan ? ...
I'm sure janhendrikx.be & standenbouw-jan.be have 301 redirects to ontwerpbureaujan.be
If not, please get it done by your Web host else Google will actually consider them as three different websites and will crawl them all.
If they have 301 redirects, then you could add the others too and Google would know that they are the same site and hence wouldn't crawl all of them.
But you could still add all of them and it may increase your pagerank for the keyword and in that case you could mention http://www.ontwerpbureaujan.be/ as your preferred domain on the site settings area.
Here are a few recommendations by Google itself:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en#4
Good luck!
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In terms of SEO (and what's considered as blackhat techniques by google spiders), should I avoid redirecting my 404 traffic to my main page?
Was thinking of adding this line to my .htaccess file
Redirect 301 /404.shtml /home.php
Don't blanket redirect all missing pages to the home page.
It's not a blackhat technique, it's just a great way to annoy bots as they have to keep following redirects and then work out if it's a soft 404 or not. Wasting their time.
Serve 404 pages when the page does not exist. And make that 404 page helpful. If it's an old page and there is a relevant page to send people to, then 301 redirect to it.
It should not be a problem unless your site is over loaded with broken links.
I think you should look at it from a users prospective, probably a user will prefer to get a 404 page and knows that the page is missing then be redirected to home page and then keep on looking for the original page
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For many websites, the "www" part of the URL is optional, e.g. http://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com are often aliases for the same page.
According to this page, there's an SEO benefit to redirecting all requests to http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com.
Is this really true? It seems to me that Google should be smart enough to check whether http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com are pointing to the same page, and only treat them as distinct pages if the content at each URL is different.
It seems to me that Google should be smart enough to check whether http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com are pointing to the same page.
They're not. That's why they offer the option to set your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools.
The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site's pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results.
Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs. If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages.
If it matters for search engine robots, it's because it matters for human beings.
URL canonicalization and redirection help SEO, yes, by concentrating otherwise diluted link juice.
Canonicalization matters for a variety of reasons -- mainly, because it organizes information, coherently associating diverse/disparate references to a single resource address.
For example, the following hypothetical URLs would likely all point to the same page (in this case, the home page of a site):
example.com
www.example.com
www.example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
www.example.com/index.html?var1=360
www.example.com/index.html?var1=46&var2=glenn
https://example.com
https://www.example.com
https://www.example.com/
https://www.example.com/index.html
https://www.example.com/index.html?var1=420
https://www.example.com/index.html?var1=46&var2=glenn
http://example.com
http://www.example.com
http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/index.html
http://www.example.com/index.html?var1=420
http://www.example.com/index.html?var1=46&var2=glenn
Which among the above is the best URL to serve as the canonical ultimate destination?
There is a correct answer (imho), but it's not listed above: https://example.com/
Why?
Trailing Slash: dramatically improves page load time.
HTTPS: it's more secure than HTTP:
Non-www Root: I'm in the non-www camp because I prefer fewer characters in URLs, but there are good reasons for the WWW as well including cookie-restriction and more DNS flexibility. Whether to go with www.example.com or just example.com (or even art.example.com) depends on your taste, preference, age, needs, plans, and goals.
When I searching our web site on Google I found three sites with the same content show up. I always thought we were using only one site www.foo.com, but it turn out we have www.foo.net and www.foo.info with the same content as www.foo.com.
I know it is extremely bad to have the same content under different URL. And it seems we have being using three domains for years and I have not seen punitive blunt so far. What is going on? Is Google using new policy like this blog advocate?http://www.seodenver.com/duplicate-content-over-multiple-domains-seo-issues/ Or is it OK using DNS redirect? What should I do? Thanks
If you are managing the websites via Google Webmaster Tools, it is possible to specify the "primary domain".
However, the world of search engines doesn't stop with Google, so your best bet is to send a 301 redirect to your primary domain. For example.
www.foo.net should 301 redirect to www.foo.com
www.foo.net/bar should 301 redirect to www.foo.com/bar
and so on.
This will ensure that www.foo.com gets the entire score, rather than (potentially) a third of the score that you might get for link-backs (internal and external).
Look into canonical links, as documented by Google.
If your site has identical or vastly
similar content that's accessible
through multiple URLs, this format
provides you with more control over
the URL returned in search results. It
also helps to make sure that
properties such as link popularity are
consolidated to your preferred
version.
They explicitly state it will work cross-domain.