continuing the discussion: www or no?

[WCD Admin]

We've heard this debate before, now I find myself having it again!

www or no-www on your domain names?

My programmers made my latest site with no www in the URL, and at first I was cool with it. Sounds good, shorter URL. maybe I get a fraction of a point in google?

My problem is, I already notice the habit of linkers is going to be to put the www. part in the URL even though its non-www.

Will this counter any good I get from natural linkers? I know I can 301 redirect to the non-www page, but will that make me lose my PR pass from the pages pointing to the www page?

[GFPC]

I often wonder the same.

I have always liked the www in the url.

Somehow i think it won't matter, but its just my gut feeling.

[Nicolas-Johnson]

We've heard this debate before, now I find myself having it again!

www or no-www on your domain names?

My programmers made my latest site with no www in the URL, and at first I was cool with it. Sounds good, shorter URL. maybe I get a fraction of a point in google?

My problem is, I already notice the habit of linkers is going to be to put the www. part in the URL even though its non-www.

Will this counter any good I get from natural linkers? I know I can 301 redirect to the non-www page, but will that make me lose my PR pass from the pages pointing to the www page?

As long as you properly set up a 301 redirect of the www. Subdomain (because that is what it is) to the root domain version of each page, the link juice should pass on just fine.

If you use linux hosting, you can get this by putting the following in your htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(remember to save a copy of your htaccess before you do anything to it, so if something goes wrong you can upload the working version you have )

[bonusgeek]

I'm not certain but I think your ok with the link juice as long as your redirecting the www version to the non www version. It shouldn't matter which version you use as long as you pick one and define it with a redirect, then google should treat both versions of your page as one which should include incoming link juice also.

[NoDepositCasino]

Excellent post by Nicolas-Johnson.

As already stated - 301 will pass everything through properly.

I do however personally believe that google is not as simple minded to give brownie points for cutting off basics of URL - I would guess they ignore www or .com when it comes to URL length. Of course more of your URL would show up in the results preview. So I would say its just a matter of personal preference.

[cowboy]

After setting up your redirect I'd suggest double-checking your work with some kind of tool. There are plenty of free ones like: Redirect Checker

I've caught otherwise costly mistakes this way many times.

[tryme1]

Generally, people link to sites using the www. format. So, for my hardly earned money, that should be the default. So, really I wouldn't use Nicholas' htaccess code, but rather something like this:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

[Simmo!]

Nicolas is on the money as I understand it and Cowboy is right because you need to make sure the www is returning a 200 OK status code.

I think www. is preferable (although impact is probably negligable) but if the site is already indexed and ranking I wouldn't change it. If its yet to get any traffic then now is the time to change it (redirecting the non-www to it of course).

[dominique]

I think google webmaster has a place where you can set which you want to use also.