www and non-www redirect

What the other spelling of the host does. Serving the site at both www and the bare name puts every page at two addresses; a 301 to one of them settles it.

• Help center

A site can usually be reached under two spellings of its host name: with www. and without. If both answer with the page, every URL exists twice. Links, shares and ranking signals are split between the two copies, analytics count them separately, and cookies set on one host are missing on the other.

How SiteScan checks it

The scanner takes the other spelling of the host you scanned and requests its HTTPS home page without following redirects. The row is labelled with that host name:

• green: it answers with a permanent redirect (301 or 308);
• amber “Serves content”: it answers 200 with the page itself, so the site is duplicated;
• amber with a status code: it redirects, but only temporarily (302 or 307).

If the other spelling does not exist in DNS, does not answer, or returns an error, the row is not shown — there is nothing to duplicate.

How to fix

Pick one host as canonical and permanently redirect the other to it, keeping the path: on nginx return 301 https://example.com$request_uri; in the server block for www.example.com. The certificate must cover both names, or the redirect itself fails with a warning. Make the canonical tags on the pages point to the same host.