www. or no www.?

[VBAssassin]

Hi ya,

 

Something that's bugged me for a while now is is it better to use www. or miss it off? Looking at it from both a SEO standpoint and a visual standpoint.

 

Kind regards,

Scott

[Daniel0]

From an SEO standpoint it doesn't matter as long as you are consistent. Semantically it does make most sense to use www because it implies that it's the webserver (as opposed to e.g. imap.example.com which would imply an IMAP server).

[atticus]

I agree...it actually does not matter which one you use, I prefer www, but the idea is to not have "two" websites when there is only one.

 

The search engines treat all sub domains as different websites, so if you have the same content on each, one is going to get hit with a duplicate content penalty. Also, if half of your inbound links go to www.site.com and half go to http://site.com you have split your link authority. By resolving all traffic (including bots) to one version of the site you harness the power of every inbound link.

[newb]

u can easily fix this issue with a simple php regex script to add www. infront of all of your links on your website. problem solved.

[Daniel0]

u can easily fix this issue with a simple php regex script to add www. infront of all of your links on your website. problem solved.

 

Better to configure Apache to do it.

[crashmaster]

if you have access to mod_rewrite - just do it like me:

 

create .htaccess file - store this file in the web root folder and add this:

 

RewriteEngine on       
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourweb\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourweb.com/$1 [NC,L]

[shenoon]

Hi ya,

 

Something that's bugged me for a while now is is it better to use www. or miss it off? Looking at it from both a SEO standpoint and a visual standpoint.

 

Kind regards,

Scott

 

Hi,

 

You can go with any one. Well, many tech savy people ignore to type "www" so I would suggest to do one thing is: "www." redirect to the non-"www." version or vice versa. This way search engines will see just the one site.

[Mchl]

Actually I've read, that search engines no longer incur penalties for sites duplicated in this way (i.e. they recognize that it is in fact one site)

[Daniel0]

Google says otherwise:

 

Provide one version of a URL to reach a document - To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this.

 

Avoid:

• having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. "domain.com/page.htm" and "sub.domain.com/page.htm") access the same content
  
• mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure
  
• using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and remember them better)
  

[Mchl]

It says to avoid it, true. One reason for that, is because web crawler will use twice as much resources (both on website side and on search engine's side).

 

However, Google at least will no longer penalize such pages with lower rankings. (You can actually tell Google, which url is the one you prefer using Google Webmaster Tools.)

[Daniel0]

But how many people do you think know that?

 

From a technical standpoint, www.example.com and example.com could be two distinct machines and strictly speaking it should be considered as two different websites. It's up to the sysadmin to make sure that people who choose the incorrect domain name gets forwarded to the correct one.

[Brian W]

But how many people do you think know that?

 

From a technical standpoint, www.example.com and example.com could be two distinct machines and strictly speaking it should be considered as two different websites. It's up to the sysadmin to make sure that people who choose the incorrect domain name gets forwarded to the correct one.

Your example made me notice something. Using www. made the forum parse into a link while not using www. left example.com as plain text. This is likely true of several forums, blogs, and SNS. So possibly, if you were to be choosing between which way you wanted people (the human brain) to index it, you should chose w/ the www.

[rs_shadow0000]

From a abstruse standpoint, www.example.com and example.com could be two audible machines and carefully speaking it should be advised as two altered websites. It's up to the sysadmin to accomplish abiding that humans who accept the incorrect area name gets forwarded to the actual one.