Should 301 redirects from www to the naked domain include the path for SEO?

Question

I'm trying to sort out a redirect for my site from www to the "naked" domain.

My redirect currently does this:

www.example.com -> example.com
www.example.com/test.html -> example.com

Is this the correct behaviour? My only concern is, is it correct for it to use a 301 redirect to bring it back to the front-page no matter where it has come from?

I would think this would be the expected behaviour would be this instead:

www.example.com -> example.com
www.example.com/test.html -> example.com/test.html

I have implemented this redirect on the nginx web server.

Answer 1

The HTTP status code 301 is named "Moved Permanently":

The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs.

So the resource (i.e., your document) would stay the same, it just gets a new URI.

As your front page http://example.com/ is (usually) not the same resource as a page like http://www.example.com/test.html, it would not be correct to use the status code 301.

Or in other words: Yes, include the path.

Answer 2

I would think this would be the expected behaviour would be this instead: www.example.com -> example.com www.example.com/test.html -> example.com/test.html

That's a good idea. Just map the last parts of the URL (particularly folder and file) from the old domain to the new domain. You can easily use mod-rewrite if you have apache. Just make an .htaccess file in the folder where the www.example.com document root is and add the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That way, everything will be nicely redirected over from the www version to the non-www version.

My only concern is, is it correct for it to use a 301 redirect to bring it back to the front-page no matter where it has come from?

The only time you should redirect a URL to the homepage is if that URL was the homepage in the past. For example, if your previous homepage was at the url http://www.example.com/homepage.html and the new homepage is just example.com, then you can use a 301 return code on http://www.example.com/homepage.html and redirect it to example.com.

Make sure you test everything as you go because you don't want to end up with too many redirects or you'll see a message in your browser something similar to "the document has moved here" and when you click on "here", the same message reappears.

Answer 3

I'm always setup 301 redirect from www.example.com domain to example.com. This code helps you:

server
{
    server_name www.example.com;
    return      301 $scheme://example.com$request_uri;
}