SEO Tips For Internet Marketers

September 21, 2011By Jill Whalen

Hi Jill,

I ran my website through a website grader type of tool and it provided me with the following recommendations:

1. Set up a 301-redirect from the non-www version of our site to the www-version so that we get proper credit.

2. Change our text-to-html ratio to be 15% or higher.

Are these advisable?

Thanks,

Rebecca

++Jill's Response++

Hi Rebecca,

1. I checked your site in Google's cache and it appears that Google already understands that the www.example.com version is the same as example.com (no www).

You can check this yourself by viewing the cache for your site here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://example.com/

(Change example.com to your real domain.)

And see if they say, "This is Google's cache of www.example.com" or "This is Google's cache of example.com." In most cases these days, Google has merged both the www and non-www /redirect-non-www, which means that it's not necessary to 301-redirect the non-www to the www.

That said, even though it's not necessary for most sites, it's still good practice to redirect them if it's not too much trouble to do on your web server. You can also set your preference for www or non-www via your Google Webmaster Tools account.

2. With reference to having a 15% or higher text-to-HTML ratio, there's absolutely no truth to that whatsoever. Someone, somewhere just made that up for something to put in their silly website grading tool! :)

Hope this helps!

Best,

Jill

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