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I currently force www. and also specify that in Google Webmaster Tools. I know it's recommended to just pick on or the other, and to not use both.

But if I change everything to not have www, and I force that in the server configs, and I change it in Webmaster Tools, will it still have an effect on my rankings?

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It probably depends on how well established you are in the rankings vs your competitors. You'll probably bounce down and back up though since it's not a major change like the title of the home page or a significant content change on your home page. It helps that you also specify it in webmaster tools and aren't relying only on redirects. – Anagio Feb 21 '12 at 21:29

migrated from ux.stackexchange.com Feb 21 '12 at 21:11

1 Answer

up vote 6 down vote

If you remember to make a 301 Moved Permanently then no, it will not affect your ranking. Reasons for this is that your URLs have already been indexed with www and when Google (or any other search engine for that matter) tries to access the URL, they are told that it has been moved permanently to a new location. This eliminates the duplicate content problem and your new URL's will be indexed without the www subdomain.

I just did it for one of my own domains and it works like a charm and haven't affected my ranking that I know of.

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