on yahoo my domain shows up as domain.com on search results and on google my domain shows up as www.domain.com I was looking at my backlinks through a link popularity tool (seocentro) and it shows about 80% higher backlinks for my www.domain.com rather than domain.com what determines how it is seen by search engines? what is the difference? should i continue to build backlinks for www.domain.com or just domain.com? thanks
Search engines treat www.domain.com and domain.com as different pages, so both can have different page rank, etc. Make a decision on which one to use, and only even use that in all your links to your website and internal. Add the code below to your .htaccess file, and it will automatically redirect domain.com to www.domain.com, meaning www.domain.com will be the only link used for backlinks, etc. Reverse the order if you want www.domain.com to redirect to domain.com <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] </IfModule> Cheers
Tim said it right. In a nutshell, pick one, use it, and redirect the other to it. I tend to point "domain.com" to "www.domain.com", but SEO-wise it doesn't really matter as long as you funnel everything to one or the other.