: What does "Warning. Website not www redirected properly" mean? I have an online store directory and have used different online sources to analyze my site. I received the following message:

@Heady270

I tested a site that had that in its error report on siteprice.org. I used curl to fetch the site both with and without the www on the domain name:

$ curl --head example.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2016 18:21:06 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

$ curl --head www.example.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2016 18:21:12 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8


The site is not 301 redirecting one to the other. Rather it is serving the same content on both. Presumably, you would get the same error if you were using 302 temporary redirects. You might even get the same error if you were using the meta rel canonical link tag, even though that would be a valid way of fixing the issue.

This has historically been considered an SEO problem. It caused duplicate content issues and did not utilize the power of all your inbound links. It was considered best practice to choose one "canonical" www or no-www and redirect the other to it.

These days, Google is much better about dealing with sites that serve the same content on multiple URLs. I'd still consider it best practice to put the redirect in place (or use the canonical tag), but it is at most a very minor SEO issue. It is not the reason that your site is not ranking well.

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