Want measurable results that improve your business? Then use these 31 Halloween social media marketing tips.
The post 31 Halloween Social Media Marketing Tips You Need To Drive Awesome Results Now appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Recently somebody has asked me how to do a backlink audit and what are the required steps for an accurate analysis. We’ve talked numerous times on what’s the best way to evaluate your links and remove the damaging ones. So, it got me thinking … We need to create a guideline.
A backlink audit shouldn’t be hard to perform. First, because you need to use it whenever you want. So, it must come in handy anytime you have new clients or you want to monitor some old sites, or anytime you’ve been penalized, your traffic dropped and you want to have a closer look at the situation.
The workflow for a backlink profile audit isn’t so complicated; it is rather natural and implies 7 action steps:
To run a comprehensive backlink analysis you need the have access to the whole list of links. The easiest way to do this is by using a link audit tool.
cognitiveSEO has a simple dashboard for keeping tracking of your backlinks by offering all the information in one place. You just need to add your website and instantly get a list with all of your links.
For those of you who want to be extra sure that everything is in, you can always import link within the tool. Simply go Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console) to download the list of links from there, too. Using the old version or Google Search Console you can download the data for your site, by going to Search Traffic » Links to Your Site.
If you chose the option to “Download latest links” you’ll get the whole list of links and not only the domains.
You can get a list of links from Google Analytics, but you’ll need a script. If you’re a tech-savvy, it’s no biggie. You’ll have to add a short, simple code in your Google Analytics Tracking code.
Sean Si, an SEO Specialist, explained in one of his articles how to track outbound links using Google Analytics through a code. You have to copy-paste the next code and put it exactly under your Google Analytics tracking code in the same script:
</script>
(your Google Analytics Tracking code)
var a = document.getElementsByTagName(‘a’);
for(i = 0; i < a.length; i++){
if (a[i].href.indexOf(location.host) == -1 && a[i].href.match(/^http:///i)){
a[i].onclick = function(){
_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘outgoing_links’, this.href.replace(/^http:///i, ”)]);
}
}
}
</script>
Then you can review your outbound links. Go to Behavior » Events » Overview. And look at the List of links from the right side:
You can collect all the links in one single file. Make sure that you add the extra links you might have form our sources and place them into the cognitiveSEO tool. Besides all the links that the tools show you, it will be a great benefit to add all the other ones gathered through manual actions.
Within the cognitiveSEO tool, you have the possibility to import links. There is an option to format your CSV file based on a simple format suggested by the tool.
In the end, your file will be successfully imported and, in case the links were already in the tool, nothing will change. In case they weren’t, they will be added to the tool. This way you’ll have access to the full list of your links. This brings us to the next step.
Once you got here, you need to have a strategy in mind. Before going into specifics, you need to evaluate your links together as a unitary piece and identify strengths and weaknesses for the whole backlink profile.
Even if we talk about new clients or you are responsible for SEO in a new company or a new SEO project, the process should take into consideration the following steps:
The number between the referring domains and links might be different. Multiple links from the same domain are considered to transfer lower value, so unique linking referring domains are typically a more relevant metric.
The chart shows the cumulative total number of analyzed links and the number of referring domains existing into the system. In case you see huge spikes for links versus referring domains (or a spike of one of the two) that could mean the website had some unnatural growth, or massive link building campaigns. And those links should be analyzed in detail in the next step of the link audit – Unnatural link Detection.
You should raise a flag in case you don’t have nofollow links or have too many. In the first scenario, if you don’t have nofollow links, it means the links were acquired in an unnatural way and the website needs further analysis to spot and remove the spammy links.
If you have too many nofollow links, then you should start generating dofollow links and create a new strategy. You can see them better in the chart pie below, right in the inBound Link Analysis.
It is natural to have low and no authority linking pages because the web itself is formed of a very high distribution of high and low-quality pages.
You should have fewer sitewide links because they are not so relevant for your website and have low-quality.
The Visual Link Explorer can quickly show why links to other pages than the homepage are important and how they help boost the overall authority of a website. You can see that all the backlinks pointing to the internal pages of a website are connected and are reinforcing the main domain.
Visual Link Explorer has lots of other advantages. You can also find the best internal pages.
The lowest-quality backlinks are represented by the smallest dots, the ones that are the closest to center of the cluster. And the highest-quality links are represented by the largest dots, farthest from the center of a cluster. So it’s really easy to analyze your high-quality link ratio and also identify your best linked internal pages.
The explanation is pretty simple. Very few websites have links on their homepage that point to a foreign website because that is a presentation page about a business/company. So, one of the few exceptions happens when those links are placed there with a paid agreement.
A natural situation would be to have links on deep pages, just like somebody would link to your website on one of their articles to recommend something that you have or give a reference.
The Webpage Category chart below is an example of a website that offers online tutorials, so most of their links come from the tech and business industry.
A more in-depth look should be applied to categories such as Gambling, Adult, Pets because it might not be related to the niche they are focusing on.
The Link Visibility chart helps you spot unnatural link footer patterns very easy. You can identify the visual location of the links on the page. In the chart below you can see three types: above the fold, body, and footer. Normally, you should have a lot of body links (links placed inside the page – usually in the content) and not header or footer links.
The Webpage Type chart allows you to profile your backlinks. This means you can see exactly the type of page it’s linking to, whether it’s a Blog, a Forum, an E-commerce site or maybe a News site. The classification can really come in handy if you want to see the linking strategy for that specific website.
Below is an example of a website that offers online tutorials, so most of their links come from blogs.
You should click on the categories such as webpage directories, article directories and parked domains because usually, these types of pages bring harmful links. For each website there might be different categories.
Link Positioning classifies each analyzed link by its type (Blogroll, Blog Post, in Content Link, etc.). Some of the worst examples are blog comments and the banner type of links. Below you can see an example of a website.
The Webpage Language classifies each page by the main language that the content was written in. The Domain TLD Distribution displays how the referring domains are distributed across the entire link profile, based on their TLD (Top Level Domains).
They both work together. To spot any irregularities, check pages written in languages that have no connection with your site. For example, you have a website that targets the US market but most of the links came from Chinese websites, written in Chinese. I’ve seen often times sites from Russia or China that were linking to strange pages. So use Google translate in case you find something unnatural.
You can easily spot the country by looking at the Top 10 Referring Countries.
Before diving into the next step, until this point you’ve gathered a lot of information for your website. The next point on the link audit will conclude with a clearer perspective of your backlink profile.
The Link History chart shows your links categorized in 9 typologies to:
The Anchor Text History shows you the evolution of the anchor texts for the live and lost links. This chart is very good for spotting any spikes which stand out from all of those that have constant evolution because it might happen some unusual activity.
Once you’ve got here, you must know that the fun part begins. There are lots of features in cognitiveSEO that offer you traces of unnaturalness.
One of the main features is the Unnatural Link Detection which will discuss a little bit further and it can point you to the unnatural and suspect links for every website you might have and also give you indications of how ok or not is your backlinks profile.
Before you get to the Unnatural navigator, there other features that can give you direct indications to which pages you receive spammy links.
One of them is the Visual Link Explorer, which helps you uncover any website’s link profile. Even if it looks like a “galaxy far, far away”, it is the easiest, yet advanced, visualization that allows you to comprehend the ever-growing complexity of a site’s link profile.
Have you ever wanted to really see your link profile, beyond a list of links? If you have been waiting for a visual link-profiling tool, then you’re in luck. The Visual Link Explorer allows you to see your link profile as a whole and visually dig into it.
Each cluster has in the center a page from your website represented with a dot and to each dot lots of other blue dots are connected, at the bottom, which represent the backlinks for that specific page.
The higher the distance from the center point to the blue bottom dots from the cluster, the higher the quality of the link. For extra information about a link (blue dot) simply click on it and you’ll see a snippet of text on the right side of the tool.
You can see them classified by unnaturalness and see if you have pages with problems. Below you can see an example of such kind. A single page has a lot of spammy links pointing to it. So, if we take the long shot, it might be a negative SEO attack or a black hat link building technique.
For further investigations, cognitiveSEO tool has an interesting and quite unique feature that differentiates it from other tools. And that’s the Unnatural navigator. This metric is very good to use in case your website was penalized by Google (manually or algorithmically), to track your risk of getting a penalty, to identify negative SEO attacks and to discover unnatural links.
Before reviewing the unnatural links one by one or in bulk (as you wish), you need to classify the brand vs. commercial anchor text. The Anchor Text Distribution is your help. It is very good for spotting any suspicious anchor texts which are out of the niche. In the screenshot below you can see an example of lots of commercial anchor text and weird anchor text such as: “187980.royalnedirectory.com”, “680176.corwndirectory.com”, “691023.directorychimp.com”.
Looking at the screenshot above, you’ll see three types of anchor texts:
There are three categories of links: OK, suspicious and unnatural and to each category the number of links is attached. The desired situation would be to have more OK links.
versus
If you have a backlinks profile with a percentage or unnatural links that is higher than 15%-20% then you might be in trouble. You’ll get a warning message saying:
This site has a highly unnatural link profile and it’s likely to be penalized by Google. You should use the Link Navigator in order to mark the unnatural links for Disavow or Removal.
Once you’ve seen the starting point of your unnatural links, you can measure the penalty risk. Look for any unnatural link signals by evaluating the issues so you can clean your backlinks profile and have a healthy status. The tool shows you some of the reasons why some of your links are considered to be unnatural or potentially dangerous. If you click on any of the bar charts, you’ll see of all the links that have that specific issue.
For a full analysis, you’ll have to click on all the unnatural links:
Google says it very clear that any link that manipulates ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Quality is defined as follows:
The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.
cognitiveSEO Unnatural Link Detection follows the quality guidelines form Google and mark links as unnatural if the website follows any of the next strategies:
When you find bad links, the best decision would be to disavow them. The Unnatural Link Detection allows you to easily disavow, add them into a file and then send the file directly to Google. They recommend it. If you find any bad links, the best to do is disavowing them, to cut the connection with your website.
After disavowing the links, go to the main page of the tool and click on Export Google Disavow and then Send disavow file. In case you have a disavow file, you can add it to the tool by clicking on Import Google Disavow and then collect others links.
The Unnatural Link Navigation tool is very powerful and, if used properly, it can help you read or prevent Google Penalties. It can save your business.
For an extra safety measure, go to Site Explorer » Rankings to see if the website has experienced any drops or increases after algorithmic penalties in Google.
In cognitiveSEO campaigns, you can perform individual analysis for each competitor or side by side comparison. So the same analysis I proposed for your website you can repeat it for your competitors. In case you want something fast and easy, you can look in particular at the two metrics I’ve explained above.
The Webpage Type that we’ve previously talked on the analysis for your own website has a lot of benefits for spotting the strategies applied by your competitors. It has a strong value because you can use these metrics for spotting the strategies followed by your competitors determining which type of sites seems to be more likely to link to you, based on your competitors’ profiles.
The Link Positioning data is highly beneficial to spy on your competitors and get some directions for your website (pros versus cons). Running a backlink analysis of your competitors allows you to find out where they’re hiding their most valuable links. Once you’ve figured it out where they’re getting traffic from, you can use those data to create a top-notch link building strategy for your site. Along with that, you can also take advantage of the timeline analysis to see the evolution of your site and your competitors’ sites.
For a side-by-side comparison use the Compare feature. This tab becomes available when there are at least two competitors in our analysis. The maximum number of competitors is 5, except for your own site. At the same time, you can analyze data about a maximum number of 6 sites.
The decision about the winner site, second place and so on is taken by comparing link ranks. The cognitiveSEO link rank is the one that makes the difference calculated by all the metrics from that table.
For a valuable addition to your backlinks profile, seek new opportunities form your competitors. In the Compare section, you can also find some link building ideas. Look at the Common links or Common domains chart:
Click on the uncommon links from your competitors because those are the links they have and you don’t, but could acquire and check the list. Make sure you order them by the Rating to see the best websites on the top. After that, it is up to you how you start your cold emailing campaign to get those links.
The link auditing process presented above can be personalized for each website. It doesn’t have to include all the steps, and of course, you can mix and match until you find the best option for you. We’ve included all the information you could achieve in order to see a more complex backlink analysis and link classification.
It is highly beneficial to perform a link audit for your website because you can find potentially dangerous backlinks and improve your links and increase your organic traffic. And remeber always is the new black 
.
As my colleague always says: The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it.
The post How to Do a Backlink Audit – The Step by Step Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Heidi Cohen interviews Pam wilson on her new book: Master Content Strategy.
Pamela Wilson delivers an approach that adapts to help you grow your skills as you grow your audience. This approach works for both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) content creation — and for bloggers, podcasters, and vloggers alike.
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Although there’s a big chance you haven’t used them, I’m sure you’ve heard about the notion of Press Releases. They used to be very popular in the SEO community back in the day. But are press releases still relevant for SEO in 2019? Is it worth spending your time dealing with a press release?
The short answer is yes. Press Releases are still relevant and probably will be for a long time to come, not only for search engine optimization, but for marketing, in general. However, many webmasters don’t really understand the concept and often end up doing things that eventually harm their websites.
Yes, you’ve heard me right. Sometimes, Press Releases can negatively affect SEO if they are not done the right way. Keep reading, as later in this article I’ll tell you how you can avoid these mistakes.
Press Releases are a way of distributing and announcing events to the press. Google defines them as “an official statement issued to newspapers giving information on a particular matter”.
Usually, they come in written format, but they can also be in audio or video format. Once someone has an event and wants it to become more popular, the best way to do it is to get the media’s attention, quickly and effectively.
But how can they do that? Well, the answer are press releases. You write a piece of content that will then be distributed to news publishers that might be interested.
Press Releases follow this line of events:
Event Happens > Press Release is Written > Press Release is Distributed to News Publishers > News Publishers Pick Up the Press Release > News is Published
The thing is, however, that it’s pretty hard to get the media’s attention. It’s even harder for editors, who are constantly bombarded with news topics from all directions. They need to filter and curate them in order to publish only the best, most interesting news.
And this is how Press Release Platforms like HARO were created. Instead of sending your press release to news publishers, you post the press release on one of these popular distribution platforms where reporters and news publishers hang out to find interesting topics.
The problem is that these platforms often become a junkyard for spammers. But before we discuss the possibility of harming your website by using these platforms, let’s have a better look at how they can help your website.
Having information about your company or an event published on big news sites is not only beneficial for your brand, but also for SEO.
How, you might ask? In most part, it’s about backlinks. If news publishers start talking about you, not only can you get backlinks from the news sites themselves, which hold a very high amount of equity, but you can also score a high number of backlinks from other webmasters who will read the news.
We all know that building backlinks is one of the most difficult tasks for SEO. Building high quality backlinks is even harder. And don’t even get me started on how hard it is to do all this naturally, without buying them or using risky tricks such as PBNs.
Well, Press Releases combine all the 3 above, which makes it probably the best link building method available.
Why?
Well, it helps you build links rather quickly, the links are high quality and they’re all also completely natural and won’t result in any penalties.
If done right, or course. If not, it’s a waste of time and it can result in penalties.
Press Releases are a good way of quickly obtaining high quality links in a natural manner. However, if not done properly, it becomes a complete waste of time and can potentially be harmful for your website.
Researching press release tactics on the internet will mostly put you on the right track. However, people quickly learn that it’s easier to get links from the Press Releases themselves rather than from the news publishers (which mostly ignore their poorly written stories).
Instead of focusing on what’s important and improving their business in ways that will produce interesting news stories, people distribute as many ‘Press Releases’ as possible to as many press release platforms as possible.
Some platforms are free and make money out of advertising so they have no problem with people coming there and posting their ‘news’.
But even the paid ones are full of irrelevant ‘news’ articles. With webmasters asking for hundreds of dollars for a backlink or guest post, Press Releases are the cheap way of getting some initial backlinks.
These posts are way too long for a press release (because Google loves longer content, right?) and full of keyword rich anchor text links, which naturally attract penalties.
Sometimes, marketing companies add these types of ‘press releases’ for hundreds of their clients, literally filling their
This way, the quality of the press release websites starts to decline. Very few companies and websites (one of them being HARO) still manage to keep the site relevant. Why? Well, because it doesn’t index its press releases. They are available only for logged in users.
This way, instead of posting a press release just for the sake of getting a backlink, you will focus on posting a press release that will actually attract the attention of a reporter.
You might be wondering yourself: “Won’t nofollow links be useless?”
Well… first of all, no. I’ve already written about how nofollow backlinks can help your website rank better.
Second, the nofollow links will only be used on the press release websites, considering these sites index their content on Google. Any other links that you will obtain as a result of a successful press release will be a mix of both nofollow and dofollow links, depending on the internal policies of the websites that link to you.
But why use nofollow links? The reason is that nofollow links reduce most risks of penalty. Google says that you shouldn’t be building or buying backlinks. Since the links on press releases are either built manually or paid for, then Google’s Guidelines require them to be nofollow.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not necessarily a Google fanboy but if you don’t want to risk anything, then it’s the right way to go.
Remember: Nofollow can also help your website rank higher.
If you have already published many press releases, then it would be a good idea to check them with the Unnatural Link Detection tool to make sure they’re not suspicious or coming from suspicious domains.
Unless we will be dominated by some advanced form of artificial intelligence that will watch our every step, publishers will always be in need of news topics. Without pushing yourself out, there’s virtually (almost) no chance of ever gaining any popularity.
Press releases can start a chain reaction not only with backlinks, but also with social media likes shares and comments. So, as long as we will have news, Press Releases will be useful.
However, why do Press Releases seem to be less popular than they were back in 2009?
Well, the answer is SPAM. As the internet and SEO grew more popular, editors and journalists have been spammed daily. So they started filtering the news stories more and more, making Press Releases a less effective strategy not in terms of SEO, but in terms of how accessible it is.
A second reason could be the penalties themselves.
Press Releases were mostly popular not because they would help with news coverage but because they could provide easy links from distribution websites.
With the SEO community pulling itself away from mass link building, “naturally” (see what I did there?), press releases became less popular.
However, if you’re focusing on the right things, which are improving your business, website, services or products and issue a press release focused on getting the media’s attention instead of grabbing a backlink, then press releases are more than worth it in 2019+.
If you focus on getting the media’s attention instead of grabbing just another backlink, Press Releases are very useful for the years to come.
The truth is you only need one reporter to pay attention to you. Get covered by just one reporter on one renowned site and the rest will follow. Your chances of getting featured are actually higher if you can target individual reporters. Have great news about graphics cards, find a reporter that’s also a gamer. Have shocking or great news about child care? Find a reporter who’s also a devoted parent.
You don’t necessarily have to use press release platforms to make a press release effective. You might e-mail reporters personally or even message them on their social media profiles, such as LinkedIn or Twitter.
An article about how to write a good press release is a topic for another time. However, the general consensus is:
I’m not elaborating on it because making a press release effective specifically for SEO is about what you don’t do rather than about what you do.
So here are 3 don’ts to take into account when writing Press Releases.
Don’t do #1: Don’t try to write a press release about anything. Don’t just post press releases monthly about your company. Unless you have something innovative original and exciting, writing about it will probably be a waste of time.
Don’t do #2: Don’t try to constantly SPAM editors. You’ll can get yourself in their spam box and not be taken for granted ever again. What people hate more than anything is spam. If a reporter sees your content over and over again with the same uninteresting things, they will filter you out, eventually.
Don’t do #3: Don’t post on as many Press Release platforms as possible. Focus on the most relevant ones. There might be places fit for your location and audience and places that are not. For example, although HARO is a great website, it serves little purpose for international clients.
If you think you’re unfit for writing a good press release, there are services out there that will write them for you!
Press releases are useful for SEO and will still be for many years to come, as long as you don’t abuse their distribution to as many websites as you can. Although they’re not as popular in the SEO community as they used to be, if done properly, a single press release can bring massive results.
Have you been issuing press releases recently? What was your experience with them? Easy to create? Are journalists ever interested in your content or has it been just a waste of time? Let us know about your experience in the comments section!
The post Are Press Releases Still Relevant for SEO in 2019? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Are you building customer loyalty? Not sure? Use this complete guide to retention content marketing to ensure that you maximize your content budget. Includes detailed content options and useful tips.
The post Retention Content Marketing: How To Create Post-Purchase Loyalty appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
WooCommerce is an exceptionally powerful, customisable retail CMS plugin for WordPress. As it’s WordPress, some organisations tend to reject it in favour of more complex platforms like Magento. While that’s probably a better choice for larger enterprise retailers, you’d be surprised by how much WooCommerce has to offer, especially for start-up retailers. With that said, […]
The post How to: Add and improve related products in WooCommerce appeared first on Builtvisible.
Heidi Cohen interviews Pam Didner on her new book: Effective Sales Enablement, a sales book for marketers by a marketer about how branding, messaging, different marketing channels, and martech can be used for sales enablement and to facilitate sales engagement.
The post Effective Sales Enablement – Author Interview appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Use this analysis of the latest Fortune 500 Social Media Research. Follow these 5 ways to make your business succeed. Includes data, charts and actionable tips.
The post Fortune 500 Social Media Research: How To Make Your Business Succeed appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
When launching a new website, there are some things that seem unimportant at first, but turn out to really be an issue later on. One of them is the WWW vs. Non-WWW issue.
When you first think about it, it doesn’t sound like much of a deal. You might not even care at all about it. When you first research it, you’ll probably learn around the web that it doesn’t really matter for SEO.
However, if you start digging deeper, you’ll discover a lot of things you didn’t know. So did I, so follow this journey to understand once and for all why this hassle about which one is better.
While the truth is that it doesn’t directly matter whether your domain is WWW or Non-WWW for SEO, it can impact it very slightly. That’s because it can potentially impact performance (although in a very slight way) and performance impacts UX, which ultimately impacts SEO.
There’s something about the WWW that you probably haven’t thought of. The fact that it’s actually a subdomain. However, because it has become so popular, people almost forgot that.
You see, the World Wide Web (www) isn’t the only thing on the internet. You also have mail, smtp, pop, ftp and other important functions that are all run under specific subdomains.
Back in the day when the internet was not so popular and e-mail was the actual thing, a web server would have the domain name alias of WWW assigned to it, just like any other protocol.
Over time, the web became the most popular thing on the internet. (Google also kind of took control of it).
People would type the URLs manually, often excluding the WWW. Webmasters caught on to this and started using the Non-WWW domain as the preferred variant.
This could be an issue for webmasters as Google sees http://www.example.com and http://example.com as two separate entities, therefore creating duplicate content issues. However, most websites now correctly 301 redirect the unused version to the preferred one. You should also note that through 301s, some of the link equity is lost, so it’s always better if you get all your backlinks pointing to the preferred version.
Both the WWW and Non-WWW versions have their upsides and downsides. Let’s outline them so that you can quickly decide which one you think is best.
Interestingly, there are 2 websites dedicated to this issue, which I will list soon enough.
WWW has been the standard for many, many years. Many people still associate www with websites.
However, these are not the pros. Not by far. You see, because of how the web works, WWW allows you to do some really cool things.
First, it allows you to set some cookies only for that particular www subdomain. Cookies get passed in a hierarchical way. This means that if you set a cookie for www.domain.com it will be passed to thing.www.domain.com and another.thing.www.domain.com and so on. You’ve guessed it: if you set a cookie for domain.com, it gets passed to all the subdomains.
Usually, the domain level cookies are important ones which you would use anyway, like session IDs and tracking scripts. However, if you want to host your images on a subdomain to remove unnecessary cookies, you won’t be able to do so by setting a cookie to the root domain.
Using WWW ensures that you only send the cookies to the WWW version, leaving any other subdomains, such as static.domain.com or img.domain.com cookie-free.
Secondly, a subdomain is more flexible, at least DNS-wise. That means you’ll be able to use CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) a lot easier.
As cons, we could say that WWW is kind of ancient. Eventually, the web will probably adapt to using the non-WWW with full potential, but it might take a while. I mean, who knows, maybe at some point we won’t even use URLs anymore.
But for now, the technology is still relying on old protocols and www is not likely to go away very soon due to its vast and efficient uses.
You can read more about the pros of using www on https://www.yes-www.org.
If you don’t use WWW, you get a prettier and shorter domain. Shorter domains have been associated with higher rankings, but that could only be a correlation.
Also, if you won’t use any cookies or if your cookies are anyway required everywhere (including images), then you will save bandwidth as there are 4 more bytes of data to be sent (www are 3 and the 4th is the dot before your domain name).
You could also say that the domain is easier to remember, spell, type and tell. This isn’t an issue with direct traffic, as there are 301s that always take the user to the good version, but it can leak link juice through the redirects. Ideally, all the backlinks should go to only one version instead of being always slip into two. This applies regardless of whether you use WWW or not.
The cons are basically the opposite of what the pros are for the WWW version:
Firstly, you can’t restrict root cookies only to the root domain, as they will always get passed on to all subdomains. However, most blogs and websites host images on the same domain anyway so the cookies get sent either way.
Secondly, it will be harder to get a CDN to work, as you will not be able to set a CNAME record for your root/naked domain without messing up other things like FTP and Mail.
Apparently, using a non-www version can also be less secure, however this is only applicable if you don’t use HTTPS and secure cookies.
If you want to see the pros of a non-www web page, go to https://dropwww.com/why.
As you can see, the reasons to drop WWW are a little more puerile. They don’t get into the technical issues at all. It seems like the reasons to keep WWW are rather stronger.
Don’t rush to decide. Not yet! Read the next section and you’ll understand why.
“Ok, from what I can tell it seems like we’re better off using the WWW. It spares us of all the hassle.“
True. As a matter of fact, I can’t really think of a big website that doesn’t use WWW.
Well, there are workarounds.
Although WWW seems like the best option, there are workarounds that make Non-WWW just as good.
We all like workarounds, especially when we really, really want to get to that result, don’t we? If you’re set in your head that you really want to go for the naked domain, then don’t worry. There are ways.
First, you could use a completely separate domain for hosting your static content. Yahoo mentions this in its guidelines. For example, they use yimg.com to host their static content.
The downside is, obviously, that you have to pay $8.99 per year for another domain. Not really a downside.
Also, if you really want to go for a CDN without using WWW, it’s possible. There are CDNs out there that have found workarounds by using some techniques called CNAME Flattening, ANAME or alias records.
You can read more about these techniques here.
Cloudflare, for example, uses CNAME Flattening and it is a perfectly viable option to use CNDs without WWW in your domain.
Considering all the workarounds available these days, choosing between www and non-www is more and more a matter of preference.
In short, (directly) no. From an SEO perspective it doesn’t make a difference whether you use WWW or not in front of your domain name. What’s important is that you have a preferred version and redirect all others to that one.
Make sure that you take all the versions into account. If you also consider things like HTTPS and /index.php, you get around 8 possible combinations that should all be pointing to a single location.
Google’s officials kind of said the same thing. However, the answer is very nuanced:
Minimal SEO implications, IMO. It’s a brand decision, in part, and audience (-savvy) decision, in part. On a new site, shouldn’t impact SEO.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) August 3, 2017
Minimal implications doesn’t really mean NO implications. Yadayada what? So on an older site it could impact SEO?
Well… If you think about it… there are some things that could slightly influence the SEO on the long run, mainly related to performance. As you know, Google really takes User Experience into consideration when it comes to ranking website. And users very much like speed. So the faster a site is, the better it will usually rank. Both CDNs and Cookie-less static resource loading are speed related improvements.
For smaller websites, it doesn’t really matter. As explained above, there are two main reasons why WWW still stands out:
However, if you’re only targeting your local market, CDN’s don’t really make a difference. If you have a small site, you probably don’t have a ton of images and also not very many cookies.
In the end, it’s pretty much a matter of speed.
With today’s servers and internet connections, a couple of cookies won’t make a difference in speed but it can make a difference in price depending on your bandwidth limits. It adds up over time, you know?
If they were to be compared, the speed is pretty much the same in many cases. Take a look at this comparison between our site and our competitor Moz. Although they also run without WWW, they host their images on a separate, cookie-less domain and distribute static content such as images and scripts through a CDN.
cognitiveSEO results
Moz results
They use a CDN which hosts their images on a cookie-less domain. The results? Not very different from us. We don’t use a CDN and don’t host our images on a cookie-less domain.
The answer is pretty simple. If you’re a blogger and don’t plan on becoming the biggest site in the world, it doesn’t really matter. Just go with whatever you like. If you really like the www version, feel free to choose it. You’ll get the benefit of having shorter and prettier URLs, which is always good for starters.
If you’ll ever need to go CDN or cookie-less for static resources, you can just use the workarounds. They aren’t any more complicated and also not a big expense.
However, if you’re planning on launching a very big website with potentially thousands of images and a lot of traffic, then it’s probably better to listen to your developers and go with the WWW version. It will make things a lot easier in the long run.
Remember: if you’ve already set the preferred version and Google has indexed it, stick to it! Unless the website has been published 2 days ago and only has 1 page, it’s not worth going through all the hassle and risk your rankings just to switch to www or non-www. Just make sure your 301s are in order and keep focusing on the most important things, like publishing and distributing great content.
If you have already published your website and search engines have already indexed it, then stick to the already chosen version!
In the end, it’s pretty clear that WWW is the easier choice if you want to take advantage of easy CDN implementation, more flexible DNS options and limiting cookies to only one place.
However, as the internet evolves, it gets easier and easier to ignore the WWW and host your site directly on the root domain. This makes its URL shorter.
For SEO at least, it’s a matter of preference. I’d say go for the WWW if you don’t really know what you’re doing at all, as it will keep things simple. However, if you really like your domain naked (just like your motorcycles and your women) then know that there are workarounds that can easily solve your problems.
Which version do you prefer? And for those that don’t use the WWW, did you even encounter the issues I’ve mentioned above? Let us know in the comments section, we’re very curious!
The post WWW vs. Non-WWW URL | Which One Is Better for SEO? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.