www or no www. does it matter

[dirkg]

Maybe a newbie question, but does it matter that I have all my www traffic being redirected to no www and when I build links I use the no www but somehow I have over 200 with www

Sorry there is no punctuation. Board though these were urls.

 

[willywonka]

If you redirected the www to no www you shouldn't have any problems.

 

[download]

It doesn't matter; just make sure you don't have two copies of your site, one with and one without the www. Make sure you redirect any other traffic to the format you choose.

I typically use the www. since it's pretty standard.

 

[jamesvick]

w3 is just anther sub-domain of your main domain name. So please redirect w3 to non-w3.

 

[download]

w3 is just anther sub-domain of your main domain name. So please redirect w3 to non-w3.

True, but www. has become so common now that it's something most internet users are used to seeing and pretty much standard.

 

[youssfy]

Google treats both different.

If you are making backlinks to www then use www in your site (you can change it in Wordpress Settings).

 

[scorpion896]

Shouldn't matter at all IMO

 

[ErgoProxE]

Search engines don't consider the use of www or not as a ranking factor, because it has no value in improving the relevance of their search results or improving the user experience.

There is one exception, however. You don't want to use both a www version of the site and a non-www version.

If you do use both www and non-www, then you'll have duplicate content problems, as some may have mentioned.

 

[counselor_X]

The best thing to do is open a google webmaster tools account (unless you don't want their eyeballs on your site). One you open the account, you have to prove that you are the owner of both the www and non-www versions of the site, and then you can set a preference of what you want to be displayed in google, but not only does it display that way in google but also all backlinks to either www or non-www count as backlinks to the same site.

 

[Dan Da Man]

Nvm..

 

[dichotom]

Same as everyone else, but I will throw in that I think when you are just starting a site and have a choice (ie: you haven't already indexed and started building links back to the non-www) you should go with the www version of the site. Not for any SEO purposes, just because that is what people are used to seeing.

 

[extramints]

From what I believe, Google treats them both differently. Not too sure about this but when building backlinks its best to type exactly as it's shown in the URL bar. It's not too hard to change it.

Also I believe building back link to a website - Google counts them as seperate links as well just because of the slash(/) at the very end. Just my observation from a number of sites I've tried.

 

[kvmcable]

If an older domain then make damn sure you look up the history of what it was before. For a new domain use www. For an auction or drop domain make sure you use what the previous owner used or you'll lose the PR and link juice. If all old backlinks were to www and you put it up as non-www then you can kiss that PR goodbye.

 

[fairhaven73]

Google treats both differently. Do a 301 redirect to either www or without.

As far as which link to use for ranking, simply use the one where google takes you.
If you're ranking any keyword for that page then click on that page in search results,
and use the link displayed in address bar.