A customer sent me a question about domain names recently.
What is the difference between [example.com] and [www.example.com]? The results are slightly different.
Google treats example.com and www.example.com as two different sites.
The reasons for this is technical but a simple illustration should make it clear.
Just looking at these domains, would you consider these to be the same site or a different site?
- new-york.example.com
- chicago.example.com
- portland.example.com
Different right?
Each one is for a different city so the website and content would all be different.
Even though the www and non-www (called naked) domains are typically used interchangeably, they are actually different sites.
In Shopify they usually end up at the same place (www.example.com) but it's common for misconfigured sites to use both. When that happens, their SEO impact is cut in half as links pointing to the same page might be counted differently depending on the domain name used.
The Shopify setting for this is called "Redirect all traffic to this domain" which you'll want to have enabled for your primary domain. (Unless you're doing something advanced which then you probably already know all about this stuff).
Today would be a good day to Install JSON-LD for SEO if you haven't yet.
You still have a couple of months before the holiday season. Just enough time to start getting Rich Snippets and beating your competition in the search results.
Eric Davis