SpiderServe Web Design

I was asked to help out on a website which has dramatically lost rankings since changing from a non-www domain version to the www version – the same domain, I should stress.

The .htaccess file had been setup correctly but as the dramatic drop in traffic happened 2 days after the redirect happened, it had to be the culprit.

Something that stood out, in the Google listings was that the homepage of the domain was still being listed as the non-www version despite other pages now showing up as the www version.

After some careful analysis of the website it transpired that the CMS used absolute links for all internal linking and all of those links were using the non-www version of the domain.
This essentially would be a confusion for Google as the .htaccess file was telling it to use www links, while the website itself was using non-www – in essence, creating an infinite loop.

With this now fixed I am waiting to see how the big G reacts and if this simple yet essential attention to detail is going to get the traffic back to the site.

The moral of this is that you shouldn’t mess around with domains unless it is really necessary – and you know exactly what is required!

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