Google: Parking Your WWW Domain Will Hurt Your Site

Sep 27, 2011 - 8:23 am 8 by

No parking domainI see it way too often... A site where the www of the domain simply does not work. In some cases, the www version goes to a 404 page or a parked domain page, whereas the non www version goes to the proper site.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a Googler saying this can be very bad for your site's performance in Google.

Gary Illyes from Google said, "it may very well affect your site in a negative way. I strongly suggest you to fix it." Gary was referring to how the non www version of his domain went to a parked domain.

Gary said:

Do you know why your domain name is parked? http://realclayovens.co.uk/

This is a very bad user experience and may very well confuse our algorithms as well. If you want to serve content only on the www version of your site, it would make sense to 301 redirect realclayovens.co.uk to www.realclayovens.co.uk

This may be common sense for most SEOs and some webmasters, but sometimes it is good to have this documented as proof.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Image from Stephen Finn/Shutterstock.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Web Analytics

Google Analytics Real Time Reporting Broken Again

Jul 17, 2025 - 10:40 am
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 17, 2025

Jul 17, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google

Google AI Mode Gets Gemini 2.5 Pro & Deep Search For A Fee

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google

Google Discover Officially Gets AI-Generated Summaries

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

How The Google Ask For Me Feature Works & New AI Local Calling

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Tests Much Larger Favicons In Search

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Google Webmaster Tools Download Errors Bug