Best time to choose a canonical URL & 301 redirect

[Winoman]

I have taken on the task of getting a fairly huge eCommerce site more SEO friendly & have just realized that no URL has been chosen as our preferred domain. Should we designate a preferred domain now or wait until after the first of the year since we are hitting our busy period right now?

[Richard555]

You mention not chosen your preferred domain - I assume you mean in Webmaster tool

Setting it to say 'www' will mean if Google finds links to the non-www then those will be attributed to the www version.

You do need to registrer your ownership of both www and non-www in Webmaster tool to do this.

Consider carefully whether you pick www or non www if you do mobile / social where every character counts.

In terms of 301's - do you expect to hit targets over your busy period if you do nothing else to sort the problem? If so then perhaps focus your time on conversions of existing traffic, then do the rest when things are not so busy.

Nigel

[Winoman]

You are correct, I am talking about in Webmaster tools. We have registered both URLs so we are good there.

I am a little confused on the picking of URL as far as mobile/social goes. Are you saying that if we linked to the www version on Twitter and set our preferred domain as non-www that it will mess up the link? Won't he 301 redirect handle that?

I agree with focusing on conversions of existing traffic during our busy period. We will implement the change after the holidays. Thank you for the good advice.

Cale

[Richard555]

Hi Cale, just to clarify re picking either www or non www - if you have a long domain name than having an extra 3 characters (www) just makes it even longer.

So if someone tweets or you do a say a newspaper advert then generally the shorter the 'address' is the better due to the physical limitations of characters.

Hope your busy period goes well!

Nigel

[irvingw]

see how Google already sees and has your site indexed and set it as that.

make sure your alternate version is 301 redirecting to the proper version.

make sure the absolute links on your site are the correct association (if non www then absolutes should be non www)

when people or sites link to you try to make sure they are linking without www if you are non www and vice versa

[Brocberry]

You can still use whatever you like in ads, it doesn't stop the other variant working. Although perhaps for links it has an seo effect?