Hello, I just published my first new site in awhile and ran it through an SEO checker. I encountered this, which I’ve never seen before, and not sure what to do to fix it:
This website uses URLs with www and non-www subdomain. This may cause duplicate content and bad links to your website.
The site is dupontphc.ca
You need to use an htaccess rule (presuming hosting is Apache based) to redirect one to the other. Google does see www. and non-www. as separate sites. You could also add the canonical URL so that Goggle knows which one is the “main” one.
Also the background image seem to load ok at first, then goes corrupted.
Thanks, I’m not seeing that image problem here. Tried several computers.
I don’t know if my server is Apache based so I’ll have to ask, but why would the site even have some www and some non-www?
How do I “add the canonical URL”?
Your site has a redirect for http to https, how did you do that?
You probabliy don’t have both, but the url https://www.dupontphc.ca/ and https://dupontphc.ca/ go to the same page. The reason search engines don’t like that is they don’t have to. You can have a complete site with www and a totally different site without the www.
So what the checker is telling you is that search engines will consider this to be “duplicate” content.
To remove the www add this to the htaccess file
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
You would need to add them to the head section of each page:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com/page/" />
it’s going to be a different URL for each page.
Thanks. I didn’t do anything to the server. I literally designed the site, got at new hosting account for this client, uploaded the site files and here’s where we’re at. I’ll try the htaccess thing.
Who is your hosting company?
The site comes back as Nginx as the server, but that maybe the front end (like a load balancer).
yeah,
They don’t seem to have much as for as on-line help goes. They don’t even say what servers Apache, IIS, Nginx, etc) or how to do redirects. At least not available to the public.
It’s okay, they’re a local company and real quick. I asked and it’s Apache.
Not an issue with the site, that looks like Google Chrome on a MacBook 16". This combination has some issues with rendering after waking up. Have the same problem from time to time.
The background image is much too large. It’s 5472px x 3648px and requires your visitor to download 2.1mb of data. Since it’s a background image you could easily reduce it to 1600px wide and get the size down to under 200kb.
Oh if only 
, it’s MacBook Pro 13" 2011 running High Sierra, on Safari. Tried it again and seems ok now. I did refresh and clear the cache a few times and still got the weird image, but all is well now.
However…on iPhone 6 (yes all my Apple tech is a touch old) on portrait, the Licensed & Insured text is off the visible page. Fine on Landscape though.
Arg, thanks for pointing that out. This site was started months ago and sat for weeks while I waited for the client. The image was only intended to be a placeholder until the client gave me a new image but he ended up liking this one.
Something got messed up with that. It was fine the other day so I’ll have to take a look.
Thanks. I found a mistake with my type size and fixed it, plus downsized the background image. I also added the redirect to the htaccess file. However it still says this in the SEO checker:
• Use 301 redirects to drive traffic to URLS with the same domain and sub domain (www and non-www subdomain).
• Try to reduce the number of used CSS files.
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