Www or not www base url

[waqid]

Here is the situation. Developer custom coded a magento commerce shop for a seo client and is having problems adding www to the URL without breaking the site. They wont be able to get this completed until a couple months down the road.

We are starting monthly SEO this June. Most directories and websites link to the www version of a site not the non www. What should I expect since we are ranking for the non-www and linking to the www version.

In web master tools i'm telling google to display the URL as www.

[AlanBleiweiss]

ouch.  If I understand what you just communicated, you've got a site that had previously worked with the www version, but now, due to technical changes, the www version doesn't function?  And won't for a couple months?

That's a scary scenario and having worked with many different developers and systems administrators over many years, I've never allowed one to tell me "we can't fix that for a couple months" and get away with that claim.

It can either be addressed or it can't at the site level or the server level, one way or another.  Regardless of development framework, you should be able to set the non-www to redirect to the www version at the server level and it should work right.  If there's a massive bug in the Magento implementation, that sounds like a very serious flaw in the developer's skill set as far as I can tell.

So - IF you're stuck, you're going to have a major SEO problem for longer than a couple months.

By all rights the only solution in that scenario is to scrap the www version altogether and NOT revert back to it in a couple months.  Change all the 301 redirect settings and within GWT to now point to the non www version.  Then work to build up more links to the non www version over time.

Because that's the only short-term solution you can do now from a best practices approach if the failure can't be quickly addressed.

And down the road, if you do this, you'd have to once again reverse everything, just causing you more problems.

So either get a developer / IT specialist who can fix it immediately, or scrap the www version altogether.

[donford]

I can't think of a reason why a properly coded Magneto site could not have www added to the urls in a very short manner of time. Like an hour or less..

If you're only on the SEO end of it, you probably already know piling on issues with linking to redirecting url's isn't the best use of your time. I think the decision has to be made by the client. You just need to make clear the anticipated results of each option. Ideally, you'd recommend to your client to fix the URL problem first, and let them know that a 2 month wait for a little fix like an .htaccess re-write is not standard for web developers.

[zigojacko]

It doesn't sound like they are a developer at all if they can't apply a basic rewrite which is included in the Magento core.

Switch URL rewriting on from the admin panel and add this in .htaccess

RewriteCond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

(replacing yourdomain.com with the domain).

May vary depending on the version of Magento although if its a new build, I would expect it to be 1.6 or 1.7.

[AlanBleiweiss]

"It doesn't sound like they are a developer at all if" no kidding!  I'm not a developer, yet as a project manager even I knew it would be that straight forward...

[waqid]

The 2 month wait is nonsense. I agree.

I appreciate everyones feedback. We are going to push for the www version, the non-www option is a no go,

Thanks : ]