www or "no" www

I have a quick question and have not been able to get a firm answer or resolution...

My new wp blog can be accessed with either www.sitename.com or sitename.com. But when I click on the header it shows sitename.com in the address bar..

My question is, does it matter? Is there a difference between having both address types out there or just one...

If so, what can I do to make it one or the other? I was just wondering from a se point of view...

Hope that makes sense!

Thanks in advance!

 

Yes it matters a little.Your www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com values would be different.

 

Hello Sir,

Yes that is no good. Search Engine's see them as two different address's, and this has in the past caused people to get flagged duplicate content.

What you want to do is pick whichever one you want to use, whichever sounds best to you, and then redirect in .htaccess the other version.

Example, lets say you wanted all http://yoursite.com/whatever.htm to be redirected to http://www.yoursite.com/whatever.htm

Use the code below in your .htaccess. Changing your url. It will automatically redirect all non www to www, and the correct page.

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

Code (markup):

 

or for those of us who are members of the no-www movement...or just prefer to not have the 'www'

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

 

I am the no-www movement! Thanks for the code.

 

I just realized that I have never 301'd one of my non www. sites...thanks for the help. I actually needed it.

 

just be consistent with your linking strategy. Don't do some as www .site.com and other as site.com.

 

Agree, that little 301 redirect in your .htaccess is something you should do for every site you operate.

 

To reiterate what was already said, choose one and stick to it in all of your links. 301 redirect the other to the one you select.

Now think about this:

While http:// and www can be considered redundant, hence the no-www movement, most people think in www terms and will automatically include the www when they type in your URL and link to it. Hence, including the www has become the de-facto best practice.

Could it be?

The reason to use the 301 is to pass link equity from links going to the version you do not use to the version you do use. We know that 301 will pass link equity but we do not know if a 301 leaks any equity. You might be passing 100% or you might be passing 75% or some other percent. This is something that has just never been adequately addressed.

Because this unknown exists and we do know that most people automatically include the www I always recommend using the www version. It cannot hurt and it just may help.

 

The search engines seeing sites with / without "www" is a search engines' problem. I don't see it too difficult to build an algo to recognize the presence of the same website no matter if "www" is or isn't present in the URL.

 

www. creates a subdomain of the second level domain. There are websites that have different content on the www subdomain than on their 2nd level domain. So it's not a search engine problem. It is a domain administrator's housekeeping responsibility.

 

This is the same reason why www.domain and domain.com have different page ranks sometimes.

 

when i try opening www.forums.digitalpoint.com, it doesnt open but when i try http://forums.digitalpint.com it opens. Probably the same case here.

 

Its preferable with "www"

 

why would you say that?...as long as you use the proper redirects it doesn't really matter...

i prefer no www...

 

You can do the redirect, or you can login to google webmaster tools and tell google which you prefer. But if the version without www is in the title tag, I'd either change that, or go with the www-less version.

 

it doesn't really matter....one of my blogs does not have a www, and it is doing well...I have a redirect set up and all the traffic hits the regular site if a www is entered...I wouldn't worry about it, since you can go on and do regular SEO with or without it.

 

I would refer with www, www can be edited through htaccess