Tess: Is it true that I should not have indexed pages without a www in front of them. I have been reading that links are split when some of them are going to the www of a site address and some are going to the non-www of a site address. Do I need a 301 redirect? How do I do a 301 redirect? Should I pay someone else to do a 301 redirect or should I just forget about a 301 redirect and do nothing? This one has me stumped! Which is best for SEO?

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Shari Sultana
Online Business Manager (marketing for retail ecommerce)

Hi Shari, I'm not sure I understand all of your question - so please come back with more info if it seems like I'm missing something here - but a 301 is really only meant to be used when you've moved a page on your site, or an entire site. It automatically sends visitors and engines to the new content, wherever it's meant to be and lets the engines know that this is a permanent move.

With that said, if you've moved something and want to initiate a search engine friendly redirect then 301 is the one to use.

You'll want to implement the redirect based on the code used in your site - there's a good bit of info for how to implement in just about any programming language here. And some further sample code for working a 301 in your .htaccess file here.

We implemented a 301 on the original domain for this site when we bought the current URL - and because it was done correctly the new domain 'inherited' page rank from the old - had we done it wrong we could have been banned by Google for our efforts.

But what you're asking about here, I think - is if you should create 301s for non-www pages on your site - and while I'm not an expert in this particular issue from what I've read and understand setting 301s for content that already exists on your site (on a www for example) *can* lead to a search engine indexing both separately and penalizing you for duplicate content as well as forcing the two 'versions' to share 'status' - kind of undermining any good SEO intentions you might have had. So unless you have an actual legitemate reason for implementing a 301 I wouldn't advise it.

If you have an article to point to though I'd be curious to read if there is another, divergent opinion on this one.

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Thanks Tess. I don't have any particular article to direct you to. It's just bits and pieces from various blogs etc. They seem to suggest that the search engines may consider my site to be 2 different ones since there is the www and the non-www versions. I don't know why that is though. Do you? I guess I was just wondering whether it was necessary to merge the 2 but if it will cause more trouble in the end, I won't do it. I just don't understand why there are 2 versions. Do all sites have a www and a non-www version? Does this make sense?

Thank you.

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Shari Sultana
Online Business Manager (marketing for retail ecommerce)

Yes, all sites have the www and non-www versions. Technically your domain is the non-www version and www is (sort of like) a subdomain but because it's always been commonly accepted that we use www to access websites, that's the way we sort of default to them today (at www.) [www is the pubilc access folder]

The search engines generally know the difference - and this isn't really something you need to worry about.

If you really want to define for Google which one it indexes you can go to Google Webmaster Central and make an account - you'll find settings in there which will allow you to direct the search spiders one way or the other. (There's lots of other good stuff there too you might find useful or interesting )

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Thank you! I'll leave it as is.

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Shari Sultana
Online Business Manager (marketing for retail ecommerce)