Hi guys. Sorry if this is a silly question, very new to SEO If I make a link to my site from any other external site, should I write the url as http://mydomain.com or http://www.mydomain.com ? I wonder if this is the cause why yahoo site explorer only display a very short list of inbound link to my site. I am sure the inbound link should be much longer then yahoo tell. It is 3 years old site and my webstat give me much better list. Mostly, I used to write the first one (without www). Is this the cause? Thank's, ii.
It's up to you.. do whatever you would prefer. Just stick to one vs. both when you start building links and make sure you canonicalize the secondary version via 301 redirect. The search engines interpret these as two different version/sites. So building links to both is not a good idea at all. If you redirect one into the other there will be less room for misinterpretation by the search engines.
Thank's for quick reply Brad Collen. Very glad with that. I will try to understand about 301 stuff soon. For now, would You explain why all inbound link with url without www seems not detected by yahoo site search? Is it because I didn't do anything with 301?
it doesnt really matter whether you use www or non-www version of the URL for link building. just make sure you stick with an uniform URL to avoid PR leak. if you have been using both versions and your backlinks are pointing to both, you can use 301 redirect to direct the non-www version URL to www version for now and then stick with www version of the URL. just do a search on 301 redirect and you will find lot of info on how to setup that
Tq Sultan. Understanding 301 is my priority now. Some more questions please: If I redirect mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com, are existing backlink (about 30) to mydomain.com will be credit immediately to www.domain.com? I always think that the true url is mydomain.com. www.domain.com is a kind of artificial one and will be directed by my host server to mydomain.com. If mydomain.com is directed to www.mydomain.com, How could be the true one will be directed to the artifical one? O I've been thinking so hard to find some logic behind that. Can anyone help me?
This is the best method most of them prepared http://www.mydomain.com PHP: It doesn't matter about those two url. Check your backlink. Use it which one is contain more backlinks
First use 301 redirect from w w w . domainname . com to domain . com or reverse of it, 2ND work on only one of them, working on both of them just wastage of links. Google is consider them as two different website and this is not helping for SEO.
If you are indexed with www prefix then stick with that and use .htaccess redirection for non-www. If your site is faily new then I suggest you go for non-www, basically the shorter the better.
As others have said, it doesn't matter whether you choose www or no www for your prefered domain. What is important is that you pick one and 301 redirect the other one to the one you picked. Otherwise your site is going to suffer from URL canonicalization issues.