Moving a website to an address with the www prefix and back

Yandex treats example.com and www.example.com as different websites — and, combined with protocol, one domain can present four distinct addresses. Until the robot works out that the content is identical, those addresses compete with each other, and the loser gives up traffic and positions for nothing.

Yandex has no preference

It does not matter to Yandex whether the address carries the prefix. The prefix dates from the 1990s and today survives mostly in platform configuration. What matters is that you choose one and make it unambiguous.

The procedure

1. Both addresses in the console, rights verified on each.
2. Content and availability checks — the main content must match (text, graphics, contact details), the new address must not be grouped with someone else’s site, server response under 10 seconds, 200 OK on the new address and 200 or a redirect on the old, and both allowed in identical robots.txt files.
3. Point the old address at the new one by one of three means: a 301/302 redirect page to page; rel="canonical" on the old pages pointing at the new ones, in the HTML or the HTTP header; or the refresh meta tag, which is sometimes read as a 302.
4. Relocate site under Indexing, choosing the direction of the move.

Note that this page offers canonical as a legitimate alternative to redirecting — the domain-move procedure does not. Where a redirect is impractical, that is the route.

What merging does and does not give you

Some accumulated signals transfer, and external links to the old address count for the new one. But Yandex repeats the caution: merging does not guarantee the same page count, ranking or traffic.

The redirect rule that matters

Redirect home page to home page and internal page to corresponding internal page. Collapsing everything onto the home page is explicitly discouraged — it strands users and slows the robot’s discovery of the new site.