Ask Kalena

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Hi Kalena

I use a company that “specializes” in mortgage sites and hosting. Since I am in the process of applying everything I am learning, I saw fit to have my site graded by one of the many online tools available.

The tool showed that my site is coming up for both the www and non www versions of my domain. When I enquired with my host about doing a 301 for my domain to one version, they said

“There is nothing we or you can reset on the Xsites as this is beyond anything we have control over. We do not support any of this nor have the capability for any one else to have it”.

How much is it going to hurt me in SEO if I don’t get this fixed like the site grader suggested?

Alex

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Hi Alex

What you’re referring to here is domain canonicalization.

Search engines can sometimes index both www and non www versions of your domain, creating duplicate content headaches for you and also link popularity dilution. Therefore, it’s best for SEO purposes if you can stick with one version of your domain and make sure all links point to that version. The www version is my recommendation because most sites will link to you using that version anyway.

Judging by the response you got from your hosts, it sounds like they’re not familiar with the issue of domain canonicalization, which is concerning. If your site host won’t allow you to use a 301 to create a conditional redirect to your preferred version, you probably need to get a new host!

Alternatively, you can use the Canonical Link Element. You can also specify your preferred URL version in Google Webmaster Tools.

My blog post Does the canonicalization of my URL impact my search engine rankings? might also be of interest.

Hi Kalena,

Hope you are doing great. I have a question regarding the importance of domain and subdomain in SEO. Should there be any difference in SEO approach while doing SEO of a sub domain and a main domain. If yes, what’s that? Also, I have noticed that the probability of a sub domain to get ranked over top SERP on competitive keywords is quite low. I have not seen many sub domains in top 10 search results. So my second question is, if I have a website with main domain and other is with sub domain and I put same efforts on both websites. Will they rank same or main domain will have additional advantage?

Regards, Manish

Hi Manish,

As you are probably aware, in recent years it has become more difficult to dominate SERPs with a single domain.  In the “good old days” it was possible to have multiple listings on page 1 (sometimes even 10), but these days this is (more or less) restricted to a maximum of 2 listings for the one domain.  It is widely accepted that this restriction also applies to subdomains – i.e. you can only have 2 listings for the same root domain – whether or not they include subdomains – However, I have seen plenty of cases where this is not the case (see example below).

I agree that subdomains don’t seem to show up as often in SERPs – but I believe that this is largely because they aren’t as widely used, and (more importantly) aren’t as widely linked to or as well optimised.

If a main domain and a subdomain have the same quality content, use the same optimisation strategies and have a similar backlink profile, I would expect them to achieve similar rankings.

And here is some evidence which I believe supports this – Try this Google query for the phrase “all aces gold coast” and you will hopefully (in these days of personalized SERPs) get results that show four separate page one listings the same  domain.

• The fist one (position #3 for me) is for the goldcoast.allaces.com.au subdomain (hence subdomains can rank better than main domains),
• #3 and #4 are for the main domain – www.allaces.com.au
• #8 is for the blog at blog.allaces.com.au

I rest my case…

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing

Hi Kalena

I was just wondering, does a longer URL registration period have a positive effect on a site’s search engine ranking?

Thanks,

Louisa

Hi Louisa

Google has confirmed in the past that both domain age and ownership history may impact the way a site is handled by the algorithm, albeit slightly. But what you’re asking is whether registering a domain for a longer period of time makes a difference to the site’s ranking?

I haven’t researched this for other search engines, but I recall that a couple of people have asked this question in the Google Webmaster forum in the past.

Google staff member John Mu responded that the length of a domain’s registration period does NOT impact how Google ranks the site. As he states, many registrars don’t publish expiration details and so if Google can’t adequately determine when a site expires, they can’t compare it to other sites so they don’t include that as a ranking factor. Besides which, a registration period for a domain doesn’t reveal much about a site.

The content on the domain is much more important from a search engine perspective than how many years it has been registered for.

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Hi Kalena

Is thefreerelaxationcd.com going to come up as often in the search rankings as freerelaxationcd.com?

Kvaud

Hi Kvaud

Why would the addition of the word “the” into your domain make any difference to rankings? What makes the difference for one site ranking against another in the SERPs is the content on the site, how well it’s optimized for the search query, the number of incoming links it has, the age of the domain and many, many other factors.

The addition or subtraction of a keyword from the domain has very little, if any, impact on the site’s ultimate ranking. You might want to review my other posts about domains and SEO to clarify things.

Dear Kalena

I am looking for a listing of all registered domain names. I have on and off searched Google but to no avail. I know it does exist. May be you can help and send me a link to that directory? In fact, I did run into it about a year back but at the time I did not put it in my favorites. I guess I should have? Thank you in advance for your help.

Thank you,
Eskay

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Hi Eskay

I’m guessing what you’re looking for is a site that automatically locates the registration details and/or availability of a particular domain name and returns all available data in a viewable format? That’s commonly known as a WhoIs Lookup.

There are scores of these that you can use. My personal favs are: Mark Monitor’s Allwhois and Dotster’s WhoIs Lookup.

cheers
Kalena