Trakis

Trakis · Rules

The site is published on two addresses

The site answering with its pages on a second host — www and non-www, or another domain — instead of redirecting to one. Search engines see two copies of every page and split what they know about the site between them. It is one of the most common problems on small sites, and one of the cheapest to fix: a single redirect on the server.

CriticalCRAWL-008 · Crawlability · checked once for the whole site

Where it usually comes from

The domain was set up to answer on both www and the bare domain, and the redirect from one to the other was never added — very common on shared hosting and new shops.

How to fix it

  • Send every request for example.com to https://www.example.com with a permanent (301) redirect, keeping the path.
  • Put it on the server or in the CDN, whichever answers first. The block below is for the one you use.
  • Check it: open https://example.com/ — each must land on https://www.example.com/.
  • Then make the canonical tag on every page name the same address, and the sitemap list only that address.
nginx
server {
    listen 80;
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name example.com;
    return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}
Apache (.htaccess)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Cloudflare (Redirect Rule)
When: Hostname is in {"example.com"}
Then: Dynamic redirect → concat("https://www.example.com", http.request.uri.path)
Status: 301, preserve query string

Shown for an example shop at www.example.com. In a Trakis report the same fix comes with your own addresses and the list of your pages it applies to.

How to check it yourself

Type both addresses, with and without www, into the browser. One of them should change in the address bar to the other; if both stay as typed, the site is published twice.

What it looks like in a report

Critical example.com answers with the site itself instead of redirecting to www.example.com.

One redirect on the server removes the second copy of every page at once. (An example shop; the numbers are illustrative.)

How the audit counts it

CRAWL-008 is a critical in the crawlability category, and weighs heavily in that category’s score. It is a fact about the site as a whole, so it is reported once, not once per page.

If the finding is deliberate on your site, it can be accepted as intentional in the report. It then leaves the list and the score, and comes back on its own if what it shows changes.

Other crawlability checks

Find it on your site

A Trakis audit runs this check and the other 65 on your site, and tells you on how many pages each one sits. Or go back to all the rules.