www vs. no www - do you need to be consistent?

my site is working with a www in front of it. some of the people linking to me are linking as a non www url. does this help/hurt with seo efforts?

 

Short answer, YES. Set up your site so that one of them redirects to the other.

 

Consider this, www.domain.com/index.html & domain.com/index.html are considered 2 seperate web pages, so Pagerank and SERP weight can in effect be "divided" between them. You want to redirect one to the other to make all "possible" inbound links to your domain absolute and the same.

 

Just to reiterate and make clear...

If I redirect domain.com to www.domain.com then all incoming links going to domain.com will still benefit SEO efforts?

 

Yes, because the entire url will be redirected with the correct www if not already included, insert the below into your .htaccess file in your top level directory.

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

Of course replace yourdomain.com with your correct domain name and extension, keep the forward slash in the 2nd line. The RewriteEngine on is not required twice in the file if it already exists.

 

I recommend to use what ssandecki told you because it`s good for search engines. Google can index www ori no www as duplicate.

 

Hey, thanks for the info. Would you put this code in the body or the head? Also, do you have to add this to every page or just the homepage?

 

Seems like you don't know what a .htaccess file is, google it.

 

go to the server admin section of this forum.

it is very important to be consistent, because otherwise you will have multiple versions of the same pages which will dilute your pagerank.

 

The search engines do not care whether you use www or no www in URLs on your site. There is nothing in their ranking algorithms that causes them to rank a www version of a URL higher than a non-www version of the same URL. So the www and non-www are treated exactly the same by the search engines from a ranking perspective.

Whether you use www or no www to link to pages on your site is totally up to you. It is based on your preference. You can base your decision to use one or the other on what looks best on a business card, what rolls off the tongue better, or which version you think consumers will most likely remember. It really doesn’t matter which you pick or why.

 

These are said to be Canonical Url. In this case the link juice can be split. To avoid this issue, we need to redirect the website either with www version or non www version permanently. For this 301 redirection can be used. 301 redirection can always be search engine friendly.