There is very little difference, if any at all. I prefer using www. as its a standard web address to most internet users. Ask them to tell you their favorite web address and most of them will add in the www.
HI... this is call canonical problem. you have to redirect all requests to the non-www version of your site to the www version using 301 Permanent redirect which will make the search engines to index your site only using the www.domainname.com In this way you will avoid a duplicate content penalty.
hmm ok I use non www and my site is already on 1st if i search it. so I guess ill do what kc tan said.. ill stick with it thanks everyone.. +reps
If you stick with the non-www version, I would redirect all 'www's to the non-www one. Matt Cutts wrote an article about this: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ And here's a site explaining how to do the redirects: http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/301-redirects-www-non-www-canonical-problems.html
yes, it will affect your rankings - in a positive way. If you redirect the www to your non-www pages, your backlinks to www will be applied to your non-www site. Hence, you will see more backlinks after the redirect. Doing the redirect is highly suggestible.
using it without the www will increase the prominence of your keyword phrases since it's closer to the left by 4 chars (including the period).
where'd you get that from? i definitely do not agree. i'm going to say that this would make no difference for keywords/serp.
hehe yea i dont agree either about the keyword being closer to the root without the www. i have some sites that use the www. and some that dont and from my experience it really doesnt matter, as long as you properly redirect one to the other the ONLY thing i guess could be a very slight downside to not using the www. is that people naturally link to websites using the www. so you could, and probably will, get some backlinks that inadvertantly point to the www. version of your site instead of the non-www, but again if its properly redirected it wont really matter
I know it has already been said, but it really cant be stressed enough, It doesnt matter seo wise which one you choose, but make damn sure you are consistent. Especially in the areas of search engine submission because they can look at it as two sites with duplicate content. I have heard people say this has been fixed but I know from personal experience that it is not. I just went through the whole redirect process for a friend who made this mistake, and believe me it cost him in the serps. Make sure you have your 301's and that they are working properly.
Search engine tend to view the sites as different site. So I always create 301 redirect to www. and build links using http://www.domain.com
It is difference when you have one more sub domain. Ex: you have a domain like example.com and you have one more sub domain like www, sub1.example.com.... Otherwise, it depend on name server, but you don't worry about it. Most of web site work well with both www and no www