What’s the difference between using WWW in the URL or leaving it out?
In this week’s FAQ Friday video we discuss what you need to know about structuring your URLs.
Transcript
Hey, what’s up guys? This is Grayson from www.leadcadence.com. In this week’s frequently asked questions Friday video, I want to talk about the difference between using the www in your domain name versus using no www in your domain name. What I’m talking about is most websites have the option to reside at one of two places, their main home page. You can have it written with the www in it or you can have it written without. For example, you can type in either one of these to get to my website. Having the option to pick either one, which one should you use?
From an SEO perspective, either one is 100% fine. There’s no difference in Google’s eyes which one you use. However, you have to pick one. What we don’t want to happen is we don’t want your website to resolve at both places. What that’s saying is that we don’t want a visitor to be able to type in both of these options and land on either one of these pages. The way it is now, if somebody types in one of these two options and both of these work out, Google’s going to see these as two different pages and split the authority and the value of both those pages into two. What we want is that no matter which version a visitor types in, that they end up at the correct place.
In this example, I have it set up on my website so that if somebody types in leadcadence.com without the www, they’re automatically directed to this version. We do that through what’s called a 301 redirect. What that’s telling Google is no matter which version somebody types in, we want them to end up here. The second way we do that is through Google Webmaster Tools. It’s part of Google’s website platform and it allows us to tell Google which version we prefer. What that does is it allows us no matter where somebody types in our website, that they always end up at the right one.
If you haven’t already done this and you are able to type in both these versions and both these versions resolve, and you can do that by just going to Chrome and Firefox. Type in both versions of your website. Look at your address bar and see if both of these are possible. What should happen if it’s been done correctly, is that no matter which one you type in, it’ll end up at the one you prefer. Either one of these will work just fine from an SEO perspective, which one should you pick given the option? In my preference, is to use the www. There’s a few technical advantages that later on down the road if you want to take advantage of them, this would be a better option.
I just think that more people are more familiar with typing in the www when they’re going to be typing in a domain name. Given the option, I would pick this one. If you already have it set up to not use that version, then that’s completely fine too. There’s no problem there. Leave me a comment, let me know what you think. Did this make sense? If you need help setting up the code to be able to make sure that these direct to the right version, leave me a comment and let me know if you need some help with that. That’s all for now. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next week.
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-Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog
April 21st is quickly approaching.
Is your website ready for the Google’s Mobile-Friendly algorithm update?
Links from the show
Google’s Mobile Friendly Test:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Google’s Mobile SEO Guidelines:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/
Schedule a consultation with us to have your website reviewed:
https://www.leadcadence.com/websiteaudit
Transcript
Hey, what’s up, guys? It’s Grayson from LeadCadence.com. Welcome to another episode of Frequently Asked Questions Friday. In this week’s episode, we’re going to be talking about something that has come up a number of times in the last few weeks, and that is Google’s algorithm update. The question we’re going to be answering today is how is Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm update going to affect my business?
Let me read off what Google’s official statement about this was, and then we’ll talk a little bit more about it in depth. This is from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, and so this is a blog that Google publishes themselves. This is from late February, and this is what they say. I quote, “Starting April 21st, we will be expanding our use of mobile friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide, and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”
Google is making it very clear that if you want your website to rank well in the search engines now, especially on a mobile device, that your website needs to be mobile-friendly or mobile-optimized. I’m going to show you a little bit about what that means, how to check to see if your website is mobile-optimized, and what to do about it if it’s not. Let’s hop in and I’ll show you a couple examples.
All right, so here we are on my desktop computer, and here’s a really simple way to see if your website is mobile-optimized. This is my main Lead Cadence homepage, and you can see most everything is laid out pretty normal. Most of the things like say these icons are left to right, but when I go over here and I grab the edge of this browser screen, and this will work in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, any browser you’re using; just grab the side of it and start to change the size of the screen. You’ll see the website respond; slightly change the layout. If it’s slightly smaller, this is probably what it would look like on an iPad, or some sort of tablet.
As it gets smaller, you’ll see the layout changes in order to make the font still readable. Now all the icons are stacked on top each other. The recent work stacked on top each other, so the layout goes to a vertical layout instead of all being side by side. It’s still the exact same website, but depending on the size of the view port, or if you’re viewing it on a tablet or mobile device, it’s going to rearrange that content differently. That’s a simple way to see if your website is mobile-optimized or not.
There’s another thing you can do is you can go to Google’s mobile-friendly website guide. There’s a lot of resources here, but one of the things that’s on here is to check if your website is mobile friendly. Don’t worry, I’ll put the links to these in the show notes so you can test your own site as well. You pretty much just go here and enter a webpage to see if it’s mobile-optimized. I know that my home page is, or I know that my website is, but I’m going to type in an old website that I built many years ago that I know is not mobile responsive.
Now that it’s done scanning, we can see that it is definitely not mobile-friendly. It makes it pretty obvious that it doesn’t pass their test. Specifically, the text is too small to read, and the links are too close together, mobile view port’s not set, content’s wider than the screen, so it gives you a little example of what it would look like if it was on a mobile phone. Yeah, that would be impossible to read; not a great user experience. A website like this is going to have a harder and harder time ranking well just because it is not mobile-friendly.
The last point I want to make about this is in regards to mobile SEO. The whole reason that Google’s publishing this update is to make it very clear that if you don’t follow these guidelines that your site is not going to rank well in the search engines. Essentially, you’re undoing any good SEO that you’ve built up until now. Unfortunately, most people still view SEO or search engine optimization as some sort of dark art, scammy, let’s gain the system sort of process. Unfortunately, there are people out there that do that, but for the most part, good SEO is just a series of best practices that you can implement on your website according to the guidelines that the search engines put out that will help you rank better in the search results.
Google’s very explicit about the sort of guidelines or the best practices that they expect to see if you want your website to rank well. This is on Google’s own website. This is their mobile SEO section, and they cover a lot of different that if you want to rank well, you need to do these things. For example, they say you need avoid these common mistakes like: block JavaScript, CSS, and image files, unplayable content, mobile-only 404s, irrelevant cross links, slow mobile pages. All of these things you need make sure aren’t happening on your website if you want them to do well.
Another thing is that, let me just dig in here to your mobile configuration. There are a number of ways to build a mobile website, and Google is pretty explicit about which one they want. For example, here they say there’s three different ways to do it that they recognize: responsive design, dynamic serving, and separate URLs. However, Google makes it very clear that responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern. Even though there are other ways to make a mobile website, there’s really only one correct way in order to get Google’s blessing in order to rank well.
Mobile SEO does not need to be some sort of lock box where we don’t know exactly what Google wants us to do. They’re pretty explicit about the best practices that we need to follow. Where do you go from here if you find out that your website is not mobile-friendly? Well, building websites, and building mobile responsive websites more specifically, is something that we can help you out with, and considering that this deadline has come up pretty quick, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of people scrambling to make sure their website is updated.
What we’ve done is we’ve put together a page on our website called Schedule a Website Audit. This a place where you can go and request for us to review your website, set up a time to meet with us, and we’ll go over and tell you some of your options about how you can bring your website up to these best practices. The website, the URL, is LeadCadence.com/WebsiteAudit, and again I’ll put these links in the show notes. What it will ask you to do is to pick your time zone, pick a date that’s good for you to talk with us. This integrates with our calendar, and then it will also give you a little survey of your information, website URL, what you’re interested in, and all that sort of thing.
Okay, so that’s all for this week’s episode about Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm update. Thanks for watching. If you’ve gotten something out of this video, hit the “like” button below; share it with your friends. If you’re ready to bring your website up to these mobile-friendly best practices, feel free to reach out to us, we’d love to speak with you.
All right, guys, have a great Friday! We’ll see you next week.