Does this effect SEO?

I reviewed a few sites which, when entered in the URL don't show "www". These site always seem to dominate the site which start with "www". Does using or not using "www" effect SEO?
How can i make my sites appear without "www"(even they are run with www).

 

just make 301 redirect www to non-www

 

Yea it does affect SEO as google sees the site without "www" as another site. Do what lifeplayer said about 301 redirect. You can do it through .htaccess

 

Starting domain names with www is just a common convention, nothing in the HTTP specification says that a website must start with www or any other prefix. It is simply a convention which began in the early days of the internet and was used to distinguish web servers from ftp, mail servers etc.

Nowadays most webmasters/domain holders make sure their sites respond to both http://www.domain.com and domain.com, because visitors used to access websites at either of the variants.

If you would like your site to respond to both, you can do this by changing the DNS settings, so that a naked your domain is redirected to your domain with www.

And as for SEO, it doesn't affect at all. The only thing you must be aware of is that you should build backlinks to only one of them: with www or without www. You should pick one of them and stick to it in all your link building campaigns. It is said that building links to the www. Format and non-www format will divide the link juice and thus the benefits.

 

I'm using wordpress. Kindly help me with this .htaaccess thing. How can i do this ?

 

You need to edit your .htaccess file (which you can find in your domain's base directory on your FTP program. If you do not have one, make one. Google 'wordpress .htaccess redirect' and the code you need should be about half-way down the first page of the first result. I can't post links yet or I would link you to it. The heading has it as redirecting from domain,com to www,domain,com so you'll just take the www off one part and replace it with the other and it should work.

 

Actually you don't need to do anything with .htaaccess file if you are using wordpress. Just log it to your admin dashboard -> go to general settings and change your domain look from there

Wordpress does this redirection automatically and you don't need to change anything

 

thanks piradzinsh!

its done. But i made some backlinks with www and now have changed it to domain.com only. However it is accessible with www. Will by backlinks work?

 

i dont think t will be problem with www or not

 

301 redirecting is a solution but do all of your back links will also be shifted to the new Domain?
i have doubt about this.
thanks

 

I don't think that absence or presence of www influences on the attendance or smth like this

 

Hi everyone,

It does effect SEO :

1) Over a long period of time there invariably will be some backlinks pointing towards the www-URL and some towards the non-www-URL. If it's not much, then no worry, but if it's a lot, you're losing a lot of juice !
I've seen websites with roughly the same amount of backlinks on the www and non-ww site without redirection, what a waste !

2) If there's two distinct URL to access the same content (without redirection, that is), then Google might consider it to be two different website, so there you have a duplicate content problem.

Sometimes it won't be a problem for Google to see that it's the same site and not duplicate content (and after all, a lot of webmasters make that mistake so Google wants to save computing time and not to index each website two times !), so it will combine the results for the two URL. But sometimes, for whatever reasons, it fails !

You can check if your site really is bothered by this with a simple site:http://example.com command, it will give you both www and non-www pages when you have this problem (it's a little bit harder to find on a huge site so be careful if you have a big site).

Johann.

 

Without "www" site dominate with "www" site, this is wrong. Generally with "www" and without "www" these 2 versions of the same site Google consider as two different sites. So, use 301 redirect.
To appear your site without www use 301 redirection.

 

No, as such there is no impact of using or not using www with your website.

Just make sure, you are redirecting one version of your website to your preferred version. Otherwise, it will result in backlink splitting.

 

use 301 redirect www to non-www ,if your domain are opening in both format www and non-www than search engine understand 2 sources of same data which gives negative value for website in order of indexing for search engine rank.

 

Its not really effect the SEO, Use url redirection for it if you still want.

 

Off course 301 redirect is a good solution for that. You can go for it..

 

Of course this effects SEO. Google tends to think of "www" and "non www" as two separate versions. Naturally both versions of your site will have the same content, when Google sees this it will think of it as duplicate content and will most likely punish you for it. A safe and simple solution for this is to make 301 redirect in the htaccess file and place it at the root directory of your site. If you make a xml sitemap for your site make sure that it has your desired priority site URLs in it.

 

Hmm. Read through everything and I guess I've got something new. Never knew this affected SEO. Changing my htaccess now