Homepage on non-www subdomain - still bad for SEO?

[j8reynolds]

I am working with a website where the homepage is at corp.example.com, which is actually a Squarespace site. They redirect www.example.com to corp.example.com and then link back to their main pages at www.example.com/category (20 of 200) or product pages at www.example.com/category/product (30 of 8M) using home page links only.

All of the homepage backlinks are either at corp.example.com or redirected from www.example.com to corp.example.com.

I know this isn't as bad as it used to be, but should they spend the time moving the homepage to www?

[lucy24]

All of the homepage backlinks are either at corp.example.com or redirected from www.example.com to corp.example.com.

Do you mean that when other sites link to your pages, they sometimes say example.com/pagename which then gets redirected to corp.example.com/pagename?

This, by itself, strongly suggests that the whole thing really ought to move over to plain example.com, since that’s already how some users think of it. It’s your judgement call whether you go with www.example.com or simply example.com. (I like to do it prosodically: given the length and syllable stress of “example”, which version sounds better?) But if all of those redirected links happen to say www, you may as well use that.

[j8reynolds]

No, the main site product and category pages have no redirects. It's just that for all links that are naturally created for www.example.com are being redirected to corp.example.com. And PR flow to the rest of the site pages is via the 40 or so homepage links to a mix of category and product pages.

[RedBar]

Tim Berners-Lee says his greatest mistake was inserting www in the url, since 1993 I have never used it on any site. Sure in the early days some people "rented" sub domains but I disgress.

I see horrible examples like this every day, make it clean and simple and get everything to example.com.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], j8reynolds!

do these redirects use a 301 or 302 status code?

... make it clean and simple and get everything to example.com.

it should be noted that you cannot host your site on example.com if you plan to use a CDN - it must be hosted on a subdomain.

[j8reynolds]

Thanks, Phranque. They use Cloudflare and I think they can create a virtual mapping or something to host the CDN home page as if it were on www, say at www.example.com/index. At another company, I've seen them do something similar with Akamai.

[robzilla]

it should be noted that you cannot host your site on example.com if you plan to use a CDN - it must be hosted on a subdomain.

Only if it's set up with a CNAME record. Some CDNs, like Cloudflare, Akamai and Cloudfront (with Route53), don't require a subdomain if you use their nameservers.

should they spend the time moving the homepage to www?

I probably would, but I don't know how that would work if corp is a Squarespace site and www is not. Can they be merged?

[j8reynolds]

Thanks, Robzilla. I'm really just looking for the justification for the effort, if it's possible. I've asked their engineering team to investigate feasibility and level of effort.