Domain prefix changed, will this impact SEO?

[Jseddon92]

Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change.

Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up.

Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed?

Thanks

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Georgina. This could definitely have an impact but since it's a more minimal change (root domain is remaining the same) hopefully it will be mitigated (or very minimal) since the 301 redirect was used.  Something else you can do though is go to Google Webmaster Tools, verify ownership of both the www and non-www and set the non-www as your preferred domain within that tool.  The same can be done within Bing as well. In addition you can update your sitemaps by uploading them there so that they include the non-www links as the target pages.  This should help speed things up and make the change over less pronounced. Cheers!

[Jseddon92]

Life saver, I have made the changes you have suggested. Thanks very much for your help.

[Jseddon92]

Hi Ryan. Further to my original question, we've noticed some of the products we were appearing high for in the SERPS have now vanished. Although some are still showing. I assume this would be temporary whilst they are being reindexed. Should we be worried? The Web company did this without any warning.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Georgina. Having pages go missing after a redirect change is fairly typical for a given time period but they should come back eventually, minus any normal fluctuations associated with rankings. You can do a few things to check on your progress, such as site:YOURDOMAIN.com searches with the addition of inurl:SPECIFIC.STRING to try and find certain sections or products. Cheers!

[Jseddon92]

Thanks Ryan. It seems the results are already starting to reappear which is quicker than I expected. Our web development company should have definitely consulted us before making this change but at least there's no major issue now. Thanks again.