Questions
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Should you use www?
Hey mag777! Happy New Year! Great question and one I'm asked a lot from my business advisory groups, clients and referral partners. It's one that undoubtedly always comes up in conversation when talking about either acquiring new domains or revamping a website... "Should we use the WWW or NON-WWW domain?" In my 12+ years of web consulting and SEO, it has boiled down to a preference ideology. As mentioned by seoman10 in this thread, it could be seen as a shorter, easier to remember URL. When marketing the domain, you'd always want to confirm the WWW is redirected to the NON-WWW if this is the path you choose to take. And visa versa NON-WWW --> WWW. As Gaston mentions too, check out your competitors URL structure. It's a quick glimpse up to the address bar while you are already doing your competitive research. Do some searches in Google as well for your website and competitors to see how much of the URL does or could display. Moz.com doesn't use WWW. They could get away with it because it's so short. I on the other hand almost need to with https://whiteboardcreations.com since it's a much longer domain. Keep this in mind for those domains you're working on, too. From an SEO school of thought and how I now operate, I choose the NON-WWW simply because we can get just a little more of the URL to show in Google SERPs, if we're targeting inner pages to provide a hint more of visual for the searcher. The URL string matches more closely to the Title and Description. That is the way I look at this strategy. Here is a quick video from Matt Cutts a few years back... should ease your concerns over redirects https://youtu.be/Filv4pP-1nw Either way, the websites you work on for yourself or your clients will be fine as long as you are consistent for the entire site and redirects are tested and confirmed functional. Cheers to a successful 2018 for you and everyone else reading! Patrick @ Whiteboard Creations (Apex, NC)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Using .ag for agriculture site with global targeting
Hello there, I'd advise against using a ccTLD that is not used generally as a gTLD. It might be more tricky to rank globally. Take into consideration that .ag ccTLD reffers as the country code domain of Antigua an Barbuda. And its listed as a ccTLD: Delegation Record for .AG - IANA Also, google may consider that TLD as a generic, as stated here: International Targetting - Search Console Help. There might be another TLD that suit a variation of that idea. Hope it helps. Best luck. GR.
International Issues | | GastonRiera0