One fixed domain variant

To a visitor it hardly matters whether your site lives at www.yourcompany.com or yourcompany.com. To search engines, they are in principle two different addresses. Add http and https, and the same page can suddenly be reachable in four ways. If those variants all exist separately side by side, Google splits the value of your pages across several addresses, and may even show the wrong one.

The four variants

• http://yourcompany.com
• http://www.yourcompany.com
• https://yourcompany.com
• https://www.yourcompany.com

The advice is simple: choose one as your main address, always with https, and permanently redirect the other three to it.

With or without www?

For visibility it makes no difference, as long as you're consistent. Without www is shorter and more modern. With www can be handy if your address is also mentioned in print or on the radio, because people immediately recognise it as a web address. If your old site has been on www for years and ranks well, there's no reason to switch.

How it works in Obelisk

In Obelisk you set per site whether you use the www or non-www variant. Visitors who type the other variant are redirected automatically. Traffic over http always goes to https, with an SSL certificate that Obelisk requests and renews on time by itself. The canonical tags, the sitemap and the hreflang tags also consistently use that one chosen variant. So there's nothing for you to do beyond making the choice once.

A concrete example

A gym had its old site reachable both with and without www, with no redirect between them. Other sites linked sometimes to one variant and sometimes to the other. Both versions appeared mixed together in Google, and the value of all those links was split across two addresses. After switching to Obelisk with one fixed variant, all links come together on one address, and Google shows only one version.

After a switch: quickly check

• Type all four variants into your browser and check that you always end up at the same address.
• Update the address in your email signature, social media profiles and Google Business Profile to the main address.
• In Search Console, preferably use a domain property, which covers all variants at once.

Common mistakes

Internal links hard-coded to the other variant, an old http address in the sitemap or a canonical, and images or scripts still loading over http. That last one even triggers a security warning in the browser. Keep everything aligned and your site looks to Google like one strong whole.