domain.com or www.domain.com ...

What one is better for SEO domain.com or www.domain.com ? Should I have everything redirected to www.domain.com ?

Thoughts ?

 

These type of questions have been asked times and times again and as usual I answer the same SEO has nothing to do with domain extensions or a domain with www or without it.

 

Nothing has importance or something. Set it from your webmasters tool and SE will try to take that data. Especially wrt Google. Also this will raise canonical issue. Check out Matt Cutts blog regarding canonical issue, you will get clear picture.

 

Fair enough, but should I set the domain to only use www or no www. ? (Google Webmasters)

 

well you can use www it wont wont hurt you and neither will not using it. So its your choice!!

 

The important thing is going with one way and sticking with it and using a redirect for the one you don't choose. What I do is I take how I'm indexed in google (be it www. or not) and build my links according to how it's already indexed.

 

Correct. I would always recommend sticking with www. It's more globally recognised.

 

And here's the best way to do it:

RewriteEngine on

# Redirects non-www version to www. version
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.tld [NC] 
RewriteRule .? http://www.yourdomain.tld{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

# Redirects /index.ext to /
RewriteRule ^(.+/)index\.ext?$ http://www.yourdomain.tld/$1 [R=301,L]

Code (markup):

Replace yourdomain with your domain name, .tld with the top level domain your domain was registered with (such as .com .net or .org), and then .ext with the default index file extension (such as .html or .php).

Note that this WILL WORK with both Apache 1.x and 2.x servers while also nipping a canonical URI bug where it hurts most.

 

both are ok.

But, you must have to use only 1. If you using www.domain.com, then redirect domain.com to www.domain.com using .htaccess.

 

Just use one of them. 301.

 

doesnt matter a lot..
but 301 redirect is advisable..

 

it doesn't matter, but follow big sites like Google. it is redirected from non www. to www.

 

As has already been said, it doesn't matter. But just choose one, don't use both.

 

either one is good but with www its better coz people has habit to add www while referring a website.

 

It's an old question

No need to worry about www and non www

The nly thing you should worry about is your domain/website IP, make it unique with dedicated IP address

 

I can clearly see you know what you're doing, the problem is I know just enough about Bind, .htaccess , and editing javascript/ css to get me in trouble.

I'm not a complete newb but have been blogging so long I've lost what little coding skills I had (which date back to the .cgi script days)

so could you please elaborate a bit more?

where do we add this code?

is this snippet intended to go

• on a robots.txt file
• or to be appended to a .htacess file
• or is it to be inserted to a web pages source code

thanks in advance.

and to answer the OP, I too don't think it makes any difference from the perspective of the user, from Googlebot's indexing perspective and the dilution of pagerank I've seen it suggested to just log into http://google.com/webmasters/tools and select which one you'd like the pagerank to fall on.

Again, from what I've been told if you do NOT select... the pagerank will be split, diluted, a percentage will be wasted because X pagerank goes to http://www and Y pagerank goes to http://, so it's to your advantage to tell Googlebot "make all of em point HERE" again this is for pagerank ONLY, I'm not suggesting that "users like one over the other" or "they'll hate your site if you have (or do not have) www.

 

A domain with or without www. is not an issue on SEO. But you should always choose one while doing backlinks. This is more important. IMO.

 

They are both the same, they don't affect SEO.

 

It goes inside a .htaccess file. Using http://www.frederickwebpromotions.com/ as an example, it would look like this:

RewriteEngine on

# Redirects non-www version to www. version
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^frederickwebpromotions\.com [NC] 
RewriteRule .? http://www.frederickwebpromotions.com{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

# Redirects /index.php to /
RewriteRule ^(.+/)index\.php?$ http://www.frederickwebpromotions.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Code (markup):

 

Thanks for the info guys.