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I have a domain example.com which is used to show a static website. I am hosting this website on AWS S3 and using Route53 to point example.com to example.com bucket.

Because I want to access the website on www.example.com as well. I created another bucket www.example.com which will redirect all requests to example.com. Just like example.com, I created A Type record on Route53 to point www.example.com bucket.

  • What will be its impact on search result, particularly Google?
  • Will it be better to have a single domain serving the website, as two domains can be taken as duplicate websites and SEO ranking will be hampered because of this?
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    It sounds like you have done good work. You do not want to serve content on both www.example.com and example.com. Using a 301 redirect is proper. You will not have duplicate content issues that way. Using an A record versus a CNAME is a choice. Either way, there should be no issues their either. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Apr 17, 2018 at 1:56
  • The type of DNS records you use (A, CNAME, ALIAS) have no SEO impact. However duplicating content on different domains does have an impact. I'm not familiar with AWS buckets. You mention redirects, but are you talking about the DNS alias proxy, or have you configured HTTP protocol redirects? It is important for SEO to use the proper type of redirect.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Apr 17, 2018 at 2:28
  • There is some internal mechanism of redirection in AWS S3. This is not DNS level redirection. That means it will be treated as duplicate. Try opening http://tarkshala.com/ and http://www.tarkshala.com/ But I always see www.tarkshala.com in URL bar.
    – Kuldeep Yadav
    Apr 17, 2018 at 2:32
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    That is indeed a 301 redirect: curl -s http://tarkshala.com/ --head HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Redirects are the proper way to handle duplication from an SEO standpoint. See: What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Apr 17, 2018 at 10:52

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Make sure to only use one version of your site whether it be www or without www.

It's preferable to redirect one version to the other so that there are no duplicates. You can do this in htaccess, and a lot of domain registrars/webhosts allow you to set the preferred version.

If your site does have duplicate versions of www and non-www, you can tell Google which version is your preferred site in webmaster search console. This will instruct which site to index and crawl. You should also strongly consider adding rel=canonical tags on all of your pages pointing to your preferred version if you're going to have duplicates. This will help Google and other search engines understand which one they should index.

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