Building links include www. or not? Or does it matter?

Hey guys,

I have read a bunch of stories about how anchor links are effected by the link beneath them. I want to know if it matters on how I input the link?

should I include the www. or not? I typically do not and I am pretty consistent with that, but I do not know if google wants to see the www.

Any suggestions?

 

It does matter...

What you're asking about is related to URL canonicalization. Each page on your site should have a single URL called the canonical or preferred URL. All other non-canonical URLs that can be used to render that same page should be 301 redirected to the canonical URL.

For example, the search engines will typically see each of the following URLs as different web pages:


http://example.com/folder
http://example.com/folder/
http://example.com/folder/index.html
http://www.example.com/folder
http://www.example.com/folder/
http://www.example.com/folder/index.html

even though they all will render the exact same HTML if your web server is configured to do so. This creates URL canonicalization issues which leads to duplicate content since they are seen as 6 pages with the exact same content.

The URL canonicalization issues also lead to split page rank/link juice. If 10 different sites link to each of the above URLs, the search engines see it as 6 different pages with 10 links each instead of a single page with 60 links. The latter would OBVIOUSLY be more desirable.

So you have to make some decisions like:

- www vs. non-www
- show default documents like index.html or hide default documents
- if you hide default documents then do you show trailing '/' or hide trailing '/'.

Personally, I always perfer my canonical URLs have www, hide default documents, and show trailing '/' after folder names containing default document. So I like www.example.com/folder/ as my canonical URLs... so I would implement the following 301 redirects:

http://example.com/folder --> 301 --> http://www.example.com/folder/
http://example.com/folder/ --> 301 --> http://www.example.com/folder/
http://example.com/folder/index.html --> 301 --> http://www.example.com/folder/
http://www.example.com/folder --> 301 --> http://www.example.com/folder/
http://www.example.com/folder/ --> NO REDIRECT - IT'S ALREADY CANONICAL <--
http://www.example.com/folder/index.html --> 301 --> http://www.example.com/folder/

Redirecting web pages with 301 redirects will transfer credit for inbound links pointing to the non-canonical URLs over to the target canonical URL. Now if 10 different sites link to each of the above URLs, the search engines will see http://www.example.com/folder/ as having 60 inbound links.

SOOOOOOOOOOOO...

To answer your original question... You should build backlinks using the canonical form of your URLs. This will avoid unnecessary redirects AND if you don't have 301 redirects in place to enforce your URL canonicalization policy, it will minimize the the likelihood of creating duplicate content and split page rank inssues.

 

you'd better choose one, with www or without www. it is not good to use the both at the same time.

 

it doesn't matter whether you use www or non-www version of the url but which ever you use, stick with it and be consistant.

 

I'd prefer you without 'www' the results will always be better!!

 

from my experience is better to use www, often do not use the www is not readable by machine

 

I dont know but always www.