www prefix, to be or not to be?

[Mjordan]

Well I've currently registered two domains with namecheap and hosting with hostgator. When I go to my site, the URL shows up as mydomain.com instead of http://www.mydomain.com

Now it still goes to my site regardless of whether I use the www prefix or not. I just want to know how I can get the www prefix to show up?

And does having the prefix make a difference? I googled it and found opinions going both ways. Some said that www will and should be deprecated and that I shouldn't use it, while others said that I should be using it.

Thoughts?

 

[Mjordan]

If u remove prefix WWW it can reduce data transfer and speed up page load times.
But I think that using prefix is better for search engines.

Ok and how do i go about making that prefix show up? Because somehow between registering my domain and hosting it with hostgator, the prefix defaulted to not show.

 

[MarketerMac]

the prefix doesn't matter.

a lot of people will suggest that you 301 redirect the www.domain.com to just domain.com, because back in the day google wasn't smart enough to know that links to www.domain.com was the same as links to domain.com.

Now that we're in 2010 and google has figured out (well, maybe) it's ass from its elbow, it doesn't make a difference one way or the other. Just make sure that the www.domain.com leads to your domain for all the internet noobs out there who still type it in.

 

[Mjordan]

the prefix doesn't matter.

a lot of people will suggest that you 301 redirect the http://www.domain.com to just domain.com, because back in the day google wasn't smart enough to know that links to http://www.domain.com was the same as links to domain.com.

Now that we're in 2010 and google has figured out (well, maybe) it's ass from its elbow, it doesn't make a difference one way or the other. Just make sure that the http://www.domain.com leads to your domain for all the internet noobs out there who still type it in.

Alright yes it does redirect. And when submitting my link and typing it in to get backlinks and such, should include the prefix or not?