Question regarding redirect to www.

[CliffAuerswald]

Good afternoon –

I was wondering if someone could help me with regards to my site @ allrmc.com

I have been generating good content and building links for some time and we're getting great results but I was wondering if my site may be suffering from not redirecting to the www.

I have heard that google treats “website.com” & “www.website.com” separately and wanted to know if this has been true in anyone’s experience?

For instance through site explorer I am finding that using site explorer without the www. We have a 39 PA but with www. It’s 63. If I redirected all visitors to www. Would my SERPS potentially improve?

I know this is probably a SEO101 question but would love feedback on this I’m too afraid to do anything drastic without asking first.

Thank you for your input! – Cliff

[john4math]

You're serving pages for http://allrmc.com/, http://www.allrmc.com/, and http://allrmc.com/index.php.  It looks like you implemented a rel canonical to point all of these to the www version of your home page.  Ideally, you could just 301 redirect all of them to the www version, but since they're all the same page, Google should respect the canonical.  If you do a general redirect for all of your pages to go from the non-www to the www version, that would fix this for the rest of the pages on your site, which also suffer from this and don't have canonical tags on them.

It won't matter for the SERPs really if you go with the www or non-www version everywhere.

[RyanKent]

I have heard that google treats “website.com” & “www.website.com” separately and wanted to know if this has been true in anyone’s experience?

I can verify both from my personal and professional experience it is absolutely true.

If I redirected all visitors to www. Would my SERPS potentially improve?

Yes. Your links are presently divided as if they are going to two different websites. By combining into one site, your backlinks will merge which will increase your PA and DA.

This is a major SEO issue which should be promptly resolved. The fix is relatively easy:

1. Determine which version of your URL is preferred, with or without the www. My recommendation would be to use whichever version of your URL has the most established backlinks.

2. Set up a 301 redirect based on your choice. Your site should only be visible to the world using one version of your URL (like the SEOmoz site, for example).

3. Review your site and ensure all your internal links consistently use the correct URL format.

4. Review your signatures, social sites and any company controlled sites to ensure they all use the correct URL format.

5. Reach out to any partners and friendly sites and request they update your web address.

It may take about a month for the full benefit of the change to be absorbed. Google indexes a small percentage of your site each day.

Many SEOs will advise you to update your preferred setting in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. You are welcome to make the change but it is not required with a proper 301 redirect in place.

[CliffAuerswald]

Thanks guys for this input it's really appreciated. So even with the canonical that I have and setting preferred domain in webmaster which I did when I setup the site I am still splitting links up and should redirect to get the full benefit. Best practice I see. Thank you!!

[KeriMorgret]

It is a best practice, and it will have the additional benefit of helping you get the links back to the correct version of the site (since people often copy and paste the link from the browser, you're giving them the correct version to copy and paste).