Hi,
Am I right in thinking I should only use one version of the website?
HTTP:// (without WWW)
HTTP://WWW (with WWW)
Currently I do not limit it on my sites. I think there is something else I should be doing to send google only to one version?
Can someone clarify please?
This should do it:-
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en
Wow. Talk about sweating the small stuff. Unless you have a real mix of links through your site, it shouldn’t matter in all reality. Either should be acceptable.
It shouldn’t matter as the content should be exactly the same…if it’s not, you’re doing something MAJORLY wrong. But the SEO difference should be almost nil
OK - read the info. I will probably leave it for now and maybe change it in future…
…do you know how subdomains for multilingual sites work? Do I need to specify anything to only appear in France for fr.site.com? Or would you leave this so people in Canada can read the French version if they like?
The bit to be aware of from that Google page is this:
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.
It’s usually advised that you choose one or the other, as otherwise you may be dividing your SEO value between two versions of your site.
I always specify one or the other via a simple .htaccess rule.
You can config virtual host to support both www and non-www.
It’s useful because I know that some customer always type www before the domain name
Redirecting one to the other solves that problem; it doesn’t matter which version users type, they end up at the preferred version of the URL.
As already explained above, if you have both versions available, Google may regard them as two different pages, and then you get into the problem of setting canonical links… Much easier to simply redirect one to the other and be done with it.
sound advice from @TechnoBear and @ralphm just wanted to mention that not specifying a preferred version leads to content duplication, you only really want one version of each web page indexed by google if possible, if you don’t tell search engines like Google etc what your preferred version should be then they will decide it for you and perhaps index both (especially if that page is linked to from an external site) which as @ralphm says, could divide the SEO value of the duplicated pages…
@MatthewBOnline, I personally believe that it’s best to install additional languages in sub folders, yoursite/fr for example, I’ve seen some of the major players moving away from sub domains lately, I think sub domains are treated as separate sites essentially and your site would be collectively stronger by having sub folders, any link juice coming in to your main page can then be equally distributed to each installed language… would be happy to hear others thoughts on that, its just a personal preference and how my own site is set up…
You should have only one.
Most websites use “www.acme.com”
This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.