Www to non www redirect

[vcasebourne]

HI there,

I was worried that my folder was not being crawled as when I searched for site:www.thekeepsakeco.co.uk/marketplace nothing came up but today I tried site:thekeepsakeco.co.uk/marketplace it does. So it is forwarding the www to the non www. When I do a search on links or analyse the domain it says there is a forwarder in place.

My site used to dominate in my niche and now is not doing very well since I moved to the new site. I know I did not handle the move well but wonder what I can do about it and wonder if this redirect is causing issues. So any link building it probably going to www. rather than non www so does that mean they are not counting.

What would you do? move everything back to www and could I do a 301 redirect for the whole folder?

Any help greatly received!

Kindest regards

Victoria

Thanks

Victoria

[matbennett]

HI Victoria,

The problem is that you have used the wrong type of redirect.

You are using a 302 redirect. This is a temporary redirect. Search engines treat this as "This has moved, but don't update anything - it'll be back soon".

What you want is a 301 redirect.  This is more "This has changed address - please update all records".

This should be a very simple task for whoever did the redirect for you. They will probably have to literally change 1 character!

I hope that helps.

[vcasebourne]

Thanks for your time Matt - I can not find any 302's anywhere and only 301 and when I do a redirect check on http://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561352-url-redirection-checker.aspx it comes back as 301.

If it is 301 is it ok or can you show me how to see the 302?

[Vizergy]

when was your site moved over to the new site?  You say that didn't go well and I have to wonder if you left out a lot of redirecting there.  If it hasnt been to long and Google still has the old site indexed (or even if not if you had good links) I would make sure you redirect every page of your old website to the relevant page of your new website.

[matbennett]

This baffled me for a moment. However I think that you have some bad regex in your .htaccess as not everything is being caught by that 301.

For instance:

http://thekeepsakeco.co.uk/marketplace/store/products/magic-mallow-impression-kit 
301s just fine, yet add the trailing slash...

http://thekeepsakeco.co.uk/marketplace/store/products/magic-mallow-impression-kit/
and you get a 200 response.

That seems to happen across a lot of URLs for you.

If you do search for site:thekeepsakeco.co.uk -inurl:www.thekeepsakeco.co.uk  you'll see the ones that have already been indexed (there may be more of course). I've checked about 10 of those for you and they were returning the 200 status.

Still not sure why I thought it was 302ing yesterday. I checked your homepage before I responded and I swear it was a 302. However that 200 response would seem to be your issue.

[vcasebourne]

Thanks for looking at this for me in such detail. I thought a 200 response meant everything was ok with the site?

[vcasebourne]

Thanks Billy - I did it back at the beginning of the new year I would say. I will see if I can go through and do all the re-directs again. Thanks

[matbennett]

A 200 does mean "OK" - for that URL (note - not for the site).

So, if you want the www. version indexed rather than the non-www version then you want http://www.keepsake.... so return a 200 response ("Yes - this URL is OK"), but you want http://keepsake... to return a 301 ("This URL is not OK. It has moved to http://www.keepsake... ").

As I say, some of your URLs do that correctly, so whoever put the redirects in place understood what they were aiming for.  However the ones with the trailing slash don't.

Is that a little clearer?