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Is a website with and without the www harmful

From: SISTRIX Team 02.02.2021 Google-Index, Google-Bot and the Crawling Process What is the Google Everflux? Robots meta tag vs. robots.txt: what are the main differences? What is an HTTP referrer? Our web site is no longer in the index - have we lost our rankings? What is a User-Agent? What is Google Search Console and How To Get Started Web Crawlers: How do They Work? Changing Google Search through Entities What is the X-Robots-Tag? What is the Mobile First Index? Rich Snippets: What are the advantages? Can the Google-Bot fill out and crawl forms? Crawl Budget: What does this mean? These are the CTR's For Various Types of Google Search Result Crawling and Indexing for extensive websites Google SERP Features: Result Types in the Search Results Why does the amount of indexed pages fluctuate so much? How can I quickly get a new page into Google's index? Why does a blocked, noindex URL show up in the search results? Is a website with and without the www harmful Shelf space optimisation on Google Find out how many pages of a domain are indexed by Google The consequences of negative user-signals on Google's rankings Why am I getting different values for indexed pages in the Google search, the GSC and SISTRIX? How can I remove a URL on my website from the Google Index? Back to overviewTo minimise Duplicate Content problems and to ensure a better indexing by the Google-Bot, Google recommends using a single domain name for a website. Previously it was possible to have multiple www and non-www domains and then ‘fix’ this in Google Search Console. Now, it needs to be done with server redirects to ensure only one copy of the website is available.ContentsContentsGSC preferred domain feature has been removedSet up redirects from non-www to the www domainnameHandle internal links uniformly You will need to decide which hostname should be preferred for your domain: without the www. (http://domain.com/), with the www. hostname (http://www.domain.com/) or even by a totally different hostname like shop (http://shop.domain.com/) If your website is discoverable under multipe hostnames then it can lead to confusion for Google, a waste of the Google crawler resources, potential URL ‘flipping’ and even canibalisation issues.

GSC preferred domain feature has been removed

Previously it was possible to tell Google to focus on only one version of your site through the Google Search Console but this GSC feature has now been removed.

Set up redirects from non-www to the www domainname

To ensure that your users, as well as other search engines’ crawlers are always send to your preferred domain, you should set up redirects. This is the best method but will require some access to your webserver configuration. Alternatively you can use canonical tags in the HTML to tell Google that the ‘real’ website page is under a different URL. Our information on keyword canibalisation is available and includes information on how to use canonicals to fix the problem. (Ideally, you will set up the required redirect and only expose one version of the site.)

Handle internal links uniformly

Once you have chosen your preferred domainname, you should design the internal links uniformly and follow your strategy to the letter. If, for example, www.domain.com was set as the preferred domain, always link your internal pages using the pattern http://www.domain.com/a-directory/file.html. It is recommended that you use absolute paths for your internal links instead of relative ones. More from Google on using www, or not, for your website. From: SISTRIX Team 02.02.2021 Google-Index, Google-Bot and the Crawling Process What is the Google Everflux? Robots meta tag vs. robots.txt: what are the main differences? What is an HTTP referrer? Our web site is no longer in the index - have we lost our rankings? What is a User-Agent? What is Google Search Console and How To Get Started Web Crawlers: How do They Work? Changing Google Search through Entities What is the X-Robots-Tag? What is the Mobile First Index? Rich Snippets: What are the advantages? Can the Google-Bot fill out and crawl forms? Crawl Budget: What does this mean? These are the CTR's For Various Types of Google Search Result Crawling and Indexing for extensive websites Google SERP Features: Result Types in the Search Results Why does the amount of indexed pages fluctuate so much? How can I quickly get a new page into Google's index? Why does a blocked, noindex URL show up in the search results? Is a website with and without the www harmful Shelf space optimisation on Google Find out how many pages of a domain are indexed by Google The consequences of negative user-signals on Google's rankings Why am I getting different values for indexed pages in the Google search, the GSC and SISTRIX? How can I remove a URL on my website from the Google Index? Back to overview German English Spanish Italian French