301 redirect to WWW on a 2 year old website with good SERPs and organic traffic?

[nicksharma04]

Hi everyone,

Recently someone pointed out that my website can be accessed in both ways i.e. by typing www.example.com or example.com. He further added that Google might identify this as duplicate content and penalize my website. So now I'm thinking about 301 redirection from non WWW to WWW using htaccess method. But my website is 2 year old now and I'm getting some decent traffic from Google. Will this redirection have an adverse effect on my rankings? Is there any other way to resolve this issue? I don’t want to lose my current rankings or organic traffic. Any help would be very much appreciated.

P.S.  Currently Google index my website pages with WWW.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

shouldn't hurt your rankings, only help. might see a temporary dip as google updates its index.

make sure the www. is the more authoritative version of your site by check PA/DA on opensiteexplorer

[Party_Experts]

I would do the redirect, essentially if you can access your site from www.example.com and example.com and both have the same content this will be classed as duplicate.

This won't do any harm to your current rankings and should actually have a positive effect

[AndyKuiper]

"...duplicate content and penalize my website"
---> duplicate content is not penalized, it's often just deemed somewhat irrelevant as Google has seen the content before and has an 'older' or in some few cases, 'considerably stronger' version of the content in its Index.

..."about 301 redirection from non WWW to WWW using htaccess ..."
---> perfect solution (this is the correct thing to do), and if anything, your site will be stronger. While 301's do lose a teeny bit of link equity, any links to the non-www version of your site will now be making the www page that much stronger.

"I don’t want to lose my current rankings or organic traffic"
---> this is highly unlikely

*you may want to set your webmaster tools setting to "www "as well

All the best - Andy

[nicksharma04]

Thank you for the quick reply. My site is also accessible from example.com/index.html Do I also need to include this URL in htacess file while writing the rules for 301 redirect?

I also have sub-domains like fr.example.com, de.example.com So do I also need to write septate 301 redirect rules/codes in their htaccess file?

[nicksharma04]

Thank you Andy for your detailed answer. My site is also accessible from example.com/index.html Do I also need to include this URL in htacess file while writing the rules for 301 redirect?

[nicksharma04]

Thank you for the reply. I will do this redirect ASAP!

[AndyKuiper]

yes you do

[OlegKorneitchouk]

/index.html should 301 redirect to the root domain (www.example.com/index.html and example.com/index.html should redirect to www.example.com)

For multilingual, you will need to set up hreflang for each language via tags or sitemap. Check out https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en for more info.