gonzomcribbinz
Regular Member
- Sep 16, 2008
- 356
- 622
I use no www with an .htaccess 301 redirect and preference setting in G webmaster tools every time.
Works well.
Works well.
Question: 'www' or no 'www' ?
- Thread starter coachw1
- Start date
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- Tags
- redirecting
thanks! i was wondering the same.
GreyWolf
Elite Member
- Aug 17, 2009
- 1,862
- 5,847
As russaus says, ignore this comment. There is no advantage of using www over non-www at all. All that matters is that you set your site to always serve up whichever version you prefer. WWW was really a pretty stupid idea from the start. It's a totally redundant subdomain that simply points to your public directory, and serves no real purpose other than to promote the idea of the World Wide Web. The world is pretty comfortable with the Internet now, and I don't think anyone is confused when websites don't include it. It's becoming more and more common not to use the www subdomain at all. If there were any advantage whatsoever to one over the other it would actually be in using the non-www since that goes straight to the public directory bypassing the redundant subdomain name. You might possibly be saving some unmeasurably miniscule amount of server resources by not using the www.
This is not a blanket rule, so you can't make a blanket statement regarding it. In some cases there may be some diminished authority when a 301 is used, BUT not in all cases. It depends on several other factors. I give a slightly more detailed answer regarding when the link juice is diluted and when it isn't in another thread dicussing a similar question.
301 Redirect --- Google SERP question! Post#1867323
You're not listening to everthing that Mr Cutts said. If you watch the video you will see that he is NOT saying that it doesn't transfer All the love, what he's saying is that it doesn't transfer all the love in All cases. His initial statement is that "typically anchor text does flow through a 301 redirect, but we don't promise that that will always happen." He goes on to say, "We reserve the right to score not only in links and how we determine the weights and the trusts for links and also the trust that we have for the redirects." He then continues on explaining that the algorithms are able to make determinations about the type of 301 redirects,and that if you trying some method of gaming the system by using redirects they will be able to tell. In that case they reserve the right to adjust the scoring accordingly. (like I said above, I gave a more detailed explaination in the other thread.)
In many statements made by google, they explicitly recommend setting up a 301 redirect to whichever url format you prefer be it www or non-www, and also to specify the same preference in webmaster tools. There is nothing to suggest in the video you linked to, nor in any other statements by google to suggest that if you use a redirection to specify www or non-www as your preference will suffer any loss of link juice whatsoever. In fact their statements imply the opposite. It's much more likely that using a 301 redirect in this situation your site will recieve the full value of all your backlinks in either format.
This is the best suggestion given. Be sure to set up the 301 redirect and then make sure you are consistently using the right links throughout your site. It's one thing for a backlink to use the wrong version, but your internal pages should all be consistent and use the right version. There is no reason any of your internal links should ever hit the 301 redirect.
@OP - Once you make the proper redirect in your htaccess file, made the selection in webmaster tools, and insured that all your internal links are formatted correctly don't worry too much about it after that. You've done what you need to do. You should definately try to do all your backlinking using the correct format, but if an occasional link or even groups of links are set up the wrong way don't worry about it.
If you're site was growing in popularity on it's own and you were getting natural backlinks then it wouldn't be under your control anyway. There would be many webmasters, social networking profiles, bookmarking site users, etc that might be using either version. For a naturally popular site you wouldn't have total control over all of your backlinks. Google knows that, which is why they give the advice to use the 301 redirect as well as setting it in webmaster tools.
hope that helps,
Wolf
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i personally tend to use www but there is one small advantage to non www espescially with highly keyword stuffed urls as in searches you could maybe have one more keyword that is able to be displayed and thus bolded maybe possibly earning you a higher ctr. but that's such an anal retentive reason to use non www
xpressioniz
Junior Member
- Jun 4, 2008
- 121
- 17
try using www version now as you can benefit from page speed if you use CDN on your subdomains to speed up website page load, for example cdn.domain.com. Without www version, this would carry cookies to all of your subdomains. Cookieless request would be faster for browsers.
See here for the explanation:
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/request.html#ServeFromCookielessDomain
Setting up cookieless domain can be found here:
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/static-cookieless-domain/
See here for the explanation:
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/request.html#ServeFromCookielessDomain
Setting up cookieless domain can be found here:
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/static-cookieless-domain/
hmm this is a good point. you could also simply use a well defined path on your cookies to get around this small consideration. this is more of a dreaming your site will become huge later on kinda of decision, but why not make this small change here to www to prevent potential headaches later on.
Also I think alot of analytics pages set cookies on the root domain anyway (google analytics does, i'm sure many others do) This makes this kind of a moot point
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