To understand website SEO forking, you must first understand that in earlier days of the Internet, there were other options for traffic to see things other than the World Wide Web (where the WWW comes from) like gopher. When you had a domain you can set what traffic went where so world wide web traffic would go to www.yoursite.com, Gopher traffic would go to gopher.yoursite.com and e-mail in its earliest days went to mail.yoursite.com. Now that most of that is obsolete and traffic flows through a primary place on your site, it’s becoming confusing for people to understand the subtle differences of this and how it can negatively affect SEO of your real estate brokerage website going forward.
Subdomains
Each of these were known as a subdomain. A subdomain is what comes before the first period in your site. SUBDOMAIN.yoursite.com It was a way to have different content in different places.
Many times I see this used for real estate brokerage websites to separate portions of the site. For example, realestatesearch.yoursite.com or an agent’s website on a real estate brokerage site such as ericstegemann.yoursite.com
The important thing to understand is that each of these, search engines consider different from the main domain. So ericstegemann.yoursite.com is not the 100% same thing as www.yoursite.com or just yoursite.com
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Forking?
Therefore, when you build your site, for SEO it’s best if you use all one subdomain or no subdomain at all. That way search engines don’t go through a process we call forking your site. Much like a fork in a road, forking your site means that a search engine has decided to index some of the pages on your site using the www and some without (and some cases using other subdomains if you have them or even the IP address of your site if you have your own.) It has to make the decision to go down indexing your content on different paths.
Assuming the content is identically the same on your www as no www, real estate brokerage website forking is bad for many reasons. First of all your search engine optimization is based around many different factors, but much being how much and what content you have on your site. If your site is indexed in both ways some of your content will get the credit on the www and some on the non-www. Google will not index the same information once on each site, it picks one for each, usually based on where it saw the information first. Therefore splitting up the total value of your site. In addition, Google probably sees some of your content on the WWW version and the non-www being the same. So you have duplicate content issues on your sites.
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So What Should I Use? The WWW or no WWW
When you have a real estate website, it really doesn’t matter if you use www or no www. Previously, people always just typed in the www in front of a URL. But as the web has evolved over the last 8 years, this has changed. Now many people just type in the domain.
As far as SEO is concerned for your real estate brokerage website, it really doesn’t matter. The most important thing though is to make sure that you’re redirecting from one to the other.
How Can I Fix This?
Many hosting companies allow you to set when you first setup your site whether you want your site to use www or no www, then automatically forward the traffic from one to the other. Many real estate website companies, like TRIBUS, automatically redirect one to the other after you apply a setting. Other’s don’t and some website vendors can even setup your entire site to be noindexed. This makes your entire site invisible to search engines. Make sure to download our real estate brokerage platform vendor checklist to see everything you should keep in mind.
Check with your hosting provider to see if they have this option:
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How Does Adding The WWW Automatically Work?
You may have heard of a redirect or a 301 redirect being used for a site before. It’s a process by which when someone visits one site you actually send them somewhere else. Many Realtors have domains sitting around and they probably just forward them to their main website, this is doing what’s called a 301 redirect. It’s the process by which your domain that’s being redirected tells the visitor’s Internet Browser that this page is been permanently redirected somewhere else (the 301 is computer code to say it’s permanent).
So your website host, when selecting an option like above is setting that 301 for you from yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com. The important thing to know is that when you do a 301 redirect some of the SEO that you have to the page the user originally went to is lost when it bounces to the new site. Search engines therefore might visit yoursite.com and see it really needs to go to www.yoursite.com . If you are using no www, and most people type in www, and the links into your site are with the www, then each time a search engine goes through there you lose, albeit small, a bit of credit for each of those. Therefore, keeping a consistent linking scheme of always using one, makes every bit of SEO flow to your site.
Recap: WWW vs NO WWW
If you have a site make sure you’ve either asked your website provider or host if they have it set to forward from no www. to www to avoid forking. You can simply test this by visiting both pages of your site in your url bar and see if whatever you typed stays. Therefore look to see if you type in www.yoursite.com, after it loads does your URL bar still say www.yoursite.com? Now do the same thing for just yoursite.com, after loading does it now say www.yoursite.com? If so, it’s setup correctly, if not, please contact your hosting or website vendor.
