Help! added WWW to wordpress site and now lost SEO ranking

[jfactor]

Hi there Everyone!

I have recently added a www to my wordpress website by going to settings>general and adding "www" to the wordpress address and the site address. After i did that i lost my SEO ranking, and also that MOZ is detecting that im getting site crawl issues stating that i have duplicate pages. an example is below:

http://www.mefco.co.nz/news

http://mefco.co.nz/news

any ideas on how to fix this?

[MattAntonino]

These things resolve themselves over time. Google (and Moz) have a record of what your site looked like. If they have 100 "pictures" of your pages and they see the www one, well that's new. We'll put that .. oh wait, it's duplicate.

They haven't gone back to see that the one it's a duplicate of is no longer there and is now redirecting. Once the bot crawls the new site entirely, those type of issues go away.

Your rankings should bounce back as soon as Google gets your domain crawled again. In the meantime if you don't have Search Console setup, do that. Go into the section that says Fetch as Google and get them to recrawl your site. Also, if you have a sitemap.xml on your site you can submit a sitemap through Search Console to help them crawl more of your site.

Those two things should get you back on track a bit quicker.

[4RS_John]

In addition to what Matt said, make sure you're using a 301 redirect to redirect from the non-www version of your site to the www version. I'm pretty sure WordPress does this on its own, but you can check:

1. Open a new tab in your browser
2. Open the Developer Tools, (in Chrome it's Cmd/Ctrl + Alt/Option + i, or View > Developer > Developer Tools).
3. Click the "Network" tab of the developer tools.
4. Turn on recording by clicking the grey circle at the left of the bar that says things like "Preserve log" and "Disable Cache"
5. Check the "Preserve Log" checkbox
6. Type http://mefco.co.nz/news (without the www, but with the HTTP - this will ensure the initial request goes to the non-www URL), into the browser and press enter.
7. A bunch of stuff will fly by - scroll back to the top, you're looking for the first request, in Chrome it'll just say "news" because that's the final part of your URL, but if you mouse over it you'll see the whole URL.
8. Check the response code on that request, if it's 301 you're fine, if it's 302 you'll want to update that somewhere. If you use Yoast SEO maybe that can handle it, or you can do it in your .htaccess file. I've attached a screenshot showing a request to http://moz.com, you can see there's a 301 redirect - in this case to https://moz.com - the address is a bit different, but it's the same principle.

I thought of something while I was writing this, so I checked for you, and found:

• http://mefco.co.nz/news DOES use a HTTP 301 redirect to http://www.mefco.co.nz/news
• http://mefco.co.nz DOE NOT always use a HTTP 301 redirect to http://mefco.co.nz (I seem to sometimes get the redirect and sometimes not, I'm not sure if it's browser caching giving it to me or if your server sometimes returns it - you may have to use an incognito window, or clear your cache, or both, to see it, as 301 responses are notoriously hard to un-cache from browsers).

Does the non-/news section of the site use the same WP install? If only part of the URL is redirecting I imagine that Google & Moz may be slightly confused.

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[MattAntonino]

Good find on the homepage - I saw it was Wordpress and assumed that would take care of the problem but you're right, something is wrong.

Also, the canonical tag is set to non-www  and needs to be fixed.

[jfactor]

Thanks Matt and John, I have run the instructions you have linked me, and i am recieing the 301 redirect on the news page, the homepage is also showing that im getting a 301 redirect (this is with cleared cache, and incognito). In saying this after checking the canonical tag it seems that http://mefco.co.nz refers back to itself (see attached)

Im just trying to figure out how to fix this on wordpress. Yes the non-/news section are on the same wp install.

Silly question, is there a way to wipe all the tags and redirects and just start over?

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[jfactor]

Furthermore, would me removing the "www" from the general settings fix my issues?

[4RS_John]

Do you want the www or not?

If you remove it now, you run the risk of people who visit the site frequently being stuck in a redirect loop and not being able to visit your site. When a browser receives a 301 redirect it caches it, very stubbornly. If you now change the 301 to point back to the original location your frequent visitors browsers will have cached the 301 that points from non-www to www, and if www returns a 301 that points to non-www, they'll just be stuck in a loop. If you want to go back I would try to make turn the current 301 from non-www to www into a 302, then change back in several days or weeks. That might not be very great for your SEO, though.

If you want to stick with the www, then stick with it. I'm not sure what I was seeing earlier, but when I check your homepage now with curl the non-www redirects me to www, as expected:

Johns-MBP:~ John$ curl -I http://mefco.co.nz
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2016 20:38:22 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.31 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.31 OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips mod_bwlimited/1.4
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.6.16
X-Pingback: http://www.mefco.co.nz/xmlrpc.php
Location: http://www.mefco.co.nz/
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Expires: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 20:38:22 GMT
Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Johns-MBP:~ John$

Where did you get the canonical info you posted above, is it from Moz? If so, it's probably outdated information. Remember what Matt wrote above about Moz & Google taking time to re-crawl your site. The way to check what your canonical tag, if any, says right now is to view the page source, ( in Chrome: View > Developer > View Source),  and look for it, (Ctrl/Cmd + F to Find in the source, then type "canonical"). In your case, your canonical is now set to the www- URL - I'm not sure if you changed it since Matt looked, or if a cache expired, but it appears correct now.

You could go through any HTTP 301 and canonical settings in the Yoast SEO plugin, (which I see you're using), but I don't think you're at that point yet. Go through and make sure everything's set to www, if that's what you want to use. Really, I think you're almost there, and probably at a point where you should wait a few days to see what happens. I made a huge change on our site last weekend, (changed 99% of our URL structure), and after a bit of bug-fixing during the week we're only seeing the start of the result in Google & Moz now.

[4RS_John]

WordPress should take care of it, I don't know why it didn't happen. Between that and you seeing the non-www canonical, maybe there's a full-page cache in action, that hadn't been invalidated yet.