Different version of your domain

[FD Capital]

I've been reading up on SEO - a regularly mentioned tip seems to be to redirect the various different versions of your domain name through to your main version. In this way all your link popularity is concentrated into one using a 301 redirect

This forum seems to have different versions I use ahrefs software and it has picked up both the https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk and https://ukbusinessforums.co.uk versions but they are not 301 redirected to the main www. version.

Is this an important issue or should I just ignore it?

Thanks

 

[Darren_Ssc]

It is a mistake, it's been (very) badly set up.

 

[SEOpie]

If you check the source code, you'll see this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/" />

The canonical link element tells search engines that the www version is the preferred version of the site. This can also be achieved in Google Search Console.

You will notice that this canonical is missing the s for https, however. This is a mistake which should be rectified.

 

[justinaldridge]

The site is redirecting for me but the canonical is still incorrect.

tip seems to be to redirect the various different versions of your domain name through to your main version.

Yes, best practice is to consolidate all the weighting into one version using 301 redirects. But ALL versions need redirecting. www is just a sub domain of the domain, it could be anything. Google could see and index each of these as different sites/pages:

https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk
https://ukbusinessforums.co.uk
http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk
http://ukbusinessforums.co.uk
https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/index.php
Etc.

The canonical tag is a signal only and not a directive. It means that Google can choose to ignore it, which it often does.

It's best to always tidy up and consolidate all versions into one.