: Would a redirect from "/" to "http://www.mydomain.com" (to add the www) delist a site? I am taking over a site for a client, and their SERP is very low for no obvious reason. I found that

@Jessie594

To answer your question : No, it is highly unlikely that a redirect to www would be responsible for delisting of a site.

Though to double check, use fetch as googlebot in Webmaster Tools and ensure the pages can be crawled okay. You can also do a site:search to see a general overview of the pages indexed. Not sure what you mean by "serp is low", but if you see the pages crawled and indexed okay then delisting isnt happening.

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@Heady270

The CNAME is not sufficient for a redirect. A DNS CNAME pointing to the same IP address will create duplicate content if the webserver is not configured to do the redirect. In that situation, the same content on the website will be available under two different URLs:

mysite.example.com http://www.mysite.example.com


Although Google is much better about dealing with this than it used to be, this is not my preferred setup for search engine optimization. Users will be able to use both versions and different users may see different things in the browser URL bar. When users create links to the site, their links will be to whichever version they chose.

Most webmasters will want to choose themselves whether or not their site uses the www or not. The redirect that you found does exactly that. Using such a redirect is very common practice. My sites all do this redirect. It will in no way contribute to SEO problems. It is considered an SEO best practice.

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