what's the difference between "www" and no "www"?

Hi, i saw that most of my back links was without "www". For example if my site name is: www. yoursite .com, then most of my back links are:

I'm quite surprised when I ranked well in my targeted keyword in google but the URL is not www. yoursite. com but yoursite.com/

Maybe this is only a small question but do you think it has any effect?

 

"www" act like a subdomain. thats all. you can get BL`s from anything.domain.com , doesnt matter, as much as u can get thousands !

 

I subscribe to the idea that www is not necessary.... see no www

 

www is the subdomain of the domain.tld , but since many users access their website with www it is good to have the www subdomain to point to the main site.

 

I have found that mixing between the two will cause a lower Page Rank value.

Whatever you select, it must be consistant. I have implemented a 301 redirect from the nonWWW to the WWW version.

In addition, in Google Webmaster Tools, there is a section that allows you to select one or the other versions. For Google to add this section to their Webmaster Tools site, should tell you that it is very important.

It is also the #1 SEO mistake being made today. Correcting this will increase a client's Page Rank everytime.

Note the following are different URLs unless you 301 them together.

http://www.catanich.com/
http://www.catanich.com
http://catanich.com/
http://catanich.com
​

 

As Zippo and Trapped said (respectively), .www is just a subdomain of the domain name (which is thus treated as a separate domain by the search engines), however most people remember "www" and type that in directly so I'd just redirect those links to your .www "subdomain" and be done with it.

And no, using a 301 redirect for this will not be seen as duplicate content since the search engines won't see it anyway. All they'd get is a "hey, what you're looking for is over there, not here" message and then be sent on their merry way to the page you want people to see - where all the action is.

 

Only because they are considered to be separate "pages" on separate "domains" - another great reason to pick one and be consistent with that practice.

Something I also suggest and recommend (as I did in my previous post).

Hmm... I didn't know they added that. Thanks for the heads up.

It is also the #1 SEO mistake being made today. Correcting this will increase a client's Page Rank everytime.
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Oh, I'm sure I can think of bigger cardinal sins than that...

 

As the other posters noted, it does not matter which you choose, but using both will "split" your Pagerank, so you should choose 1 and do a redirect from the www version or vice versa.

 

Choose one and set up your .htaccess to only have one. Avoid duplicate content, and having basically two duplicate sites ie www. and no www. can only seem to hurt.

 

how to choose one? I don't judge my natural back links...what to do? do I need to tell each of them to change the anchor text? C'mon, they don't even understand what SEO is...anyway, what is 301 redirect? can teach me?

 

there is no difference between using www version or without www but it's important to use the same version for all of your links

 

There is a difference - the search engines treat them as separate domains and would thus hit you with a duplicate content penalty if your pages pointed to one and your inbound links pointed to the other without you redirecting the inbound links to their proper location.

And no, wokaka, you don't need to tell them to change their link structures. A 301 redirect on your server will do that for you (automatically). Are you using Apache by any chance?

 

I'd say the difference is about 3 w's

 

Create the file .htaccess in your root dir (if isnt exist), and add this code:

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

Thats the 301 redirect for wokaka.com to www.wokaka.com

 

I strongly agree with that. Good point

 

I think u have submitted google site map, just go to google web master tool there is one option provides which ask you to choose any one option among two.
as other member told do 301 redirection from not www to www. it is also one of the way.

 

Do I need to add this code below the other code in .htaccess?

 

from my knowledge its better to put www. before the domain cuz most people access it with www.
But as far as being penalised for having links with www. and without www. thats just absurd and not true. without www. stand for whole site of yours including all other pages while www. stand for your main page.
So in other words you can't and won't get penalised for having different links.
As far as pagerank goes it is true that www. and without www. can have a different pagerank if you link them differently but you can always redirect users to the higher pagerank page!

 

"www" is act as Subdomain. it's not important for SEO.

 

Google will treat these both sites as a different domain :
www.sitename.com
sitename.com

So the link building for such two domains will result in less benefit as the benefit will be sub divided into two parts.So i would prefer you should choose one domain and work over it from now onwards...