www or non-www, pick one: Crawl Audit check 165

Short answer: example.com and www.example.com are two different addresses. If both show your site, you have two copies competing with each other. Pick one, and redirect the other to it. Check 165 checks that they come together on one host.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Full audit: it requests the www version of your domain and follows any redirects. It passes if that loads, and warns if it doesn't resolve cleanly.
• Free check: it compares the host in your canonical tag with the host that served the page. Matching passes; different hosts, or no canonical tag, warn.

A www version that shows a full copy of your site, with no redirect, also passes the full audit. Type both addresses into your browser and watch the address bar.

What Google says

• "Pick one of those URLs as your canonical URL, and use redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL."
• "For the quickest effect, use HTTP (also known as server-side) redirects."
• On which to choose: "if you don't have a preference, we'll choose the best option we find." Either works as long as you're consistent.

Setting it up

• Add both names to your host, and set one as primary with a permanent (301 or 308) redirect from the other.
• Point your canonical tags, sitemap and internal links at the primary.
• Keep the certificate valid for both names (check 141), or the redirect itself shows a browser warning.

On devmarde.com

We use devmarde.com without www. On 6 October, www.devmarde.com returned a 308 to devmarde.com, and our canonical tag pointed at devmarde.com. It passes.

Sources

• Google Search Central, How to specify a canonical URL (updated 10 July 2026) and Bye bye preferred domain setting (18 June 2019), checked 6 October 2026.