Why does my site come up with httt://mysite.com rather than http://www.mysite.com and will this effect my rankings? its a database driven car sales site in php.
no matter how it is showing on google. if you realy think it has to show www then set back links to www, or redirect your http site to www site, or set this thing in google analytic.
I doesn't matter but it's best to make clear to the search engines in your .htaccess file that you want either http://example.com or http://www.example.com
ok everyone is saying it doesnt matter which is not satrictly true you need to decide which one you want to use and use only that www or non www i always use www but that is really personal preference. the reason being that any backlinks to http://www.yoursite.com may be seen as a different page than just to http://yoursite.com so if you have 1k links and half go to each page you only get half the juice in effect. or so the arguement goes i would always use www as you need to consider the uneducated masses which is 95% of internet users. theywill use www out of habit mostly so i think having the www in place is the best option. my 2c
I'm agree with you turbosatan, it does matter a lot. Specially when you have large amount of backlinks. Where the link juice come from and where it go it's the core of most SEO jobs i have do. I would like to add that redirect need to be in http header with 301 code and on the whole domain pages, not only for the root. (i've seen many people who try to do that with javascript or redirect only the website root from a .htaccess)
I also agree with turbosatan. Using your site with both www and without www would only split your PR and SERPs between the two. You can also define your preferred domain in google (and other) webmaster tools if you don't know how to put 301 redirect.
If you going to leave it make sure all your back links going to http://mysite.com and that you link it like that. http://www.mysite.com cause it will affect your back links allot hope it helps.
From my experience it does matter. Setting a redirect isn't that hard too, simply add this code into your .htaccess RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] or you can also configure it through google webmaster tool. Just my $0.02
Yes this redirect is VERY important. It helps the SE's distinguish between the 2 domains and not consider it as 2 separate different websites, hence leading to duplicate content issues.