If your site has used www for the last few years is it a good idea to direct to non www?

[webestate]

I had a website moved to wpengine lately and when the developer set it up on wpengine he used http://example.com/.  For the last few years the site has been directing to http://www.example.com/

Should I redirect the site to http://www.example.com/ to avoid losing indexed pages and google rankings?

[Marcus_Miller]

Don't change the URL if you can help it, especially as this is an uneccessary change.

You could specify the correct URL in webmaster tools and use a 301 to get around this easy enough but my advice would be to keep the www if possible.

Marcus

[webestate]

The developer had already changed it without checking with me.  

Will it hurt anything if I change it back to www.example.com?

I believe I have to change it in several different places right?

via WPengine dashboard, user portal in the domains tab, and google webmaster tools

Is there anywhere else that I should check to make sure it's set up correctly?

[Marcus_Miller]

Has this effected traffic or indexation? Does requests from Google results still resolve correctly?

If I follow a link from Google for www.example.com/page1.html what happens?

Ultimately, this does not really matter too much. Just get the www back on the front by doing whatever you need to make that so and also tie a 301 to the non www version so if any of the pages have been indexed without the www then they will get updated back to the single www version.

A canonical URL to the www version would not hurt either.

But, other than that, webmaster tools, your site map, Wp settings etc.

I would do some testing on the site with webbug or some such tool so you can check HTTP headers and make sure that everything is as it should be.

[webestate]

I don't think it has effected traffic or indexation yet.  However he did this about 4 days ago and I didn't realize it until now.

Right now it seems that he redirected ALL www to non-www.

If I follow a link from www.example.com/page1 it is redirected to example.com/page1

So even though it does not matter too much you still suggest I redirect to www.example.com?

Thanks Marcus.  This has had me worried for the last few days.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey,  check the redirect with webbug to make sure it is giving a 301. If so, you could likely leave it. I would still ask him to undo this and not change your URLs but it will not bring the house crashing down as long as those redirects and canonicals are correct!

[webestate]

I just installed webbug.  Do I just enter the url and then click "get"?

Where would I typically see if it's giving me a 301?

This is what I see

HTTP/1.1 200 OKServer: nginx/0.7.65Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:13:37 GMTContent-Type: text/htmlContent-Length: 899Last-Modified: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:58:50 GMTConnection: closeAccept-Ranges: bytes

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