Looking For Industry Feedback

[coastdaleparks]

Hi All,

I'm new to SEOmoz, I'm head of marketing for Coastdale Parks. I would like some feedback on the companies websites. I have designed all five websites and I am self-taught I really like the tools on this site and after a day I feel I am more in-tune with my SEO and what I have to do to increase our online presence.

I know how advanced you all our but I have to ask this question;

'On google it give you the preference of having a www. or non www and to create a 301 redirect. I chose the non www. however when I did this I have seen a drop in visitors at first I thought it might be due to the weather being really cold and therefore customers were looking to fly out of Britain, not looking on our websites'. This might be a freak change in customer behaviour, or me changing and not placing the 301 properly'.

[Mike.Goracke]

You are correct in saying your 301 is not working properly. You will want to get your traffic and link juice associated with your preferred domain as soon as possible.

If you use OpenSiteExplorer, you will see that your non-www version has fewer links than the www version. With this set up, you are essentially splitting your authority between two sites instead of one. According to Google, "Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs. If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages."

Once you get your 301s in place and Google recrawls and reindexes your website, I would think that you would see your number of visitors return to its normal volume.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[coastdaleparks]

Thank you very much Mike, I have repeatedly tried to set the 301 redirect for my sites using code;

Permanent URL redirect - generated by www.rapidtables.com Redirect 301 / whitbypark.co.uk

but this has not worked - could you please suggest a good code to use. Thank you very much for your time.

Chris

[Mike.Goracke]

I am no htaccess expert, but I think you want to change it to:

Redirect 301 / http://whitbypark.co.uk/

Give that a whirl.

Mike