SEO, Canonicals and www - your advice please

[samwhiteman]

Hi - I have a question about www and not www. I have a live site, gptforhr.com and I had a question about domains and SEO. Consider me n00b.

Currently:

• I publish to both https://www.gptforhr.com and https://gptforhr.com
• I have set the global canonical tag to https://www.gptforhr.com
• I did an ahrefs site audit and the score is 55, perhaps this is because of the 301’s
• The non-www page of the site does OK on Google, gets on the front page a bit for specific searches.

My main questions are:

1. Should I continue to publish to both www and not?
2. If so, are there any other best practices for SEO I should be following?
3. If not, are there any tradeoffs?

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

In general you want to set the default domain, and that’s generally the www version. To do that, click Make default next to the www name, and republish.

That will ensure that the sitemap correctly generates entries like https://www.gptforhr.com/contact rather than https://gptforhr.com/contact ( no www ).

When you do not set a default domain, Webflow sort of randomly picks one of your domains as the one to use in the sitemap.xml.

If you’ve already set a default domain, and republished, then you might be manually generating your sitemap.xml - in that case you need to update it manually to include the www to avoid that redirect.

Set a default domain | Webflow University

[Daria_M (Daria)]

I thought the version with www is an old practice. Non-www sites are used to better perform in terms of SEO.

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

@Daria_M

I thought the version with www is an old practice.

Nope. And either way, it’s what Webflow supports. if your DNS supports CNAME flattening, you can take either approach.

@Daria_M

Non-www sites are used to better perform in terms of SEO.

Google doesn’t care.

WWW vs Non-WWW Preferred Domain Name URL | Which One Is Better?.