Switching from www to no subdomain

Will it hurt me?

[Jobarr]

I just switched from using the www subdomain on my site to no subdomain at all. All traffic to www.example.com/whatever is redirected to example.com/whatever via mod_rewrite (a 301 error).

So, I am wondering...since many sites still link to the site with www, will this hurt my search engine rankings? Is it worth telling EVERY SINGLE ONE to change their links?

Thanks!

[claus]

>> will this hurt my search engine rankings?

No it will not. Consistency is key - use www or not, just don't use both.

I did exactly the same thing a couple of months ago and this did not hurt my rankings at all. Toolbar PR stayed the same, it even increased a bit, but that was because the non-www version had higher PR than the version with www. My domain does simply not exist with www in the google serps anymore, the non-www address has completely taken over everything, including backlinks, it's all as it should be.

As long as you have that 301 in place and it works, Google (and the others) can identify that these two domains are the same thing. Links? Well, i didn't ask anyone to change their links. I don't need to do that - it's the same domain now; that's what a 301 means. If i didn't have that 301 it would perhaps be relevant.

Google will still need around three weeks before everything is figured out. It will be fine eventually, although you might see wrong URLs in the serps for a week or two.

/claus

[dirkz]

Claus is right, but if your question is will this hurt my SE ranking then I would say yes, at least temporarily.

I did this roughly the same with a site of mine (which already had a pretty nice position), and for two weeks both sites (old and new one) were gone from the index, except for the main page of the new site, but it wasn't nearly ranked as good as the original one.

After two weeks, finally the new site came to the surface again, with all pages, ranked better than the original one.

[Jobarr]

Thanks for the info. I was hoping that is how it would work!

I actually have 3 domains, like example.com, example.net, and example.org. Now EVERYTHING goes to example.com.

I am hoping that will help my ranking too since .net and .org were in the search engines too and might have pulled me down because they were the same site.

[Jobarr]

Just an update...

Google now has removed my site .com site with WWW from the index. The .net and .org ones are still there but have low rankings like normal. My .com site without the WWW is there and updated, but has a low ranking too at the moment.

Before I was number 2 for my keyword. Now I can't even find my site.

I am hoping this will all be sorted out in the next update! :(

[beowulfdk]

Can you give me the rewriterule code that will redirect h*tp://www.domain.com* to h*tp://domain.com* with the correct moved permanently code? :) I am interested in getting the www version of my site (ne1.net) away from google.

[dirkz]

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