Why is the result so different between www.url and without www in the url?

[TomChung]

Given that both urls go to the same identical site.

With www.url campaign set up, search visibility is 4x greater. Site crawl issues: 270.

Total visit is 10% more without www.url with site crawl issues: 51,305.

Both have the same Domain Authority and External links.

I'm curious on why the difference. TIA.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Tom,

Can you explain a little more about this? So do you have duplicate sites or just www / non-www pointing to the other? Just struggling to envisage what is going on.

-Andy

[TomChung]

Thanks for responding, Andy.

To  clarify, there's only one site--with the non-www site pointing to the other.

However, I should point out the site is a new Wordpress just launched 5/25. Not knowing any better, the Moz set up had the non-www so we saw a ton of crawl issues including the 901. That's when we added a new campaign with the www and saw the different results as noted above.

Tom

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I would check to make sure there is nothing else that is leaking non-www pages through. It does happen if an .htaccess rule isn't correct, for example.

Do you have Screaming Frog? Download it and just run your site through it to see if you can find anything.

-Andy

[TomChung]

Thank you for the suggestion. Screaming Frog is awesome!

[ThompsonPaul]

The search engines (and therefore the related tools) consider the www and non-www versions of a URL to be completely different websites, Tom. Therefore the metrics associated with each will pretty well always be different. And more radically so over time, depending on which one is used as the canonical or primary version.

This can most easily be seen in Google Search Console. It is actually advisable to verify both the www and non-www versions of your site separately. In addition to seeing the way the search engine sees the sites differently, you'll be offered the opportunity in the settings to tell Google which version of your site you want to be the "real" (canonical) one.

Hope that helps?

Paul

[TomChung]

Thank you Paul.

Lessons learned: Do track both www and non-www sites separately as you suggested. I noticed on the Google Webmaster Tool, it even recommends tracking https if the site moves to the secure environment from http. I do see the results being slightly different, but not a lot.

The big difference in the results I noted earlier (site crawl issues) was because the scanning was still in progress. After a couple of days, the numbers got much closer together.