www or no www

I was checking my backlinks today on http://backlinkwatch.com/ and I saw that I was getting different results for my site with the www and without the www. My site itself is a wordpess blog and every time I enter my site in the browser with the www's it removes them automatically. Anyway, should I link my site with with the triple w's, without, or it doesn't matter?

I find it doesn't really matter unless your using some type of distinction yourself. Google does to a degree treat sub domains as separate domains but, I believe the effect is fairly limited.

google treats them differently, it says so itself in google webmasters.
just add both to google webmasters verify you own both, set a preferred domain (ie www. or http://) job done

I've been told www. is better.

www it looks treat better in google

Italian Hawk said:

I've been told www. is better.

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it makes no difference, its just whichever people link to you as. and if you set it up as owning both in google webmasters you get link juice either way.

If you have a subdomain other than 'www' then Google will treat it as a separate site, but the www is effectively ignored by them when it comes to anything measured, like PR, on the main site.

Yahoo and Bing however DO treat the 'www' subdomain as a separate site and rate it differently. If you're using Wordpress it's best practice to use the appropriate canonical setting to avoid splitting the benefit of your backlinks.

www and non www sites are treated as separate entities by Search engines, including google. So if you have links going to www and then other links going to non www site , thats basically a waste of resources, something we cannot afford.

The general practise is to put up a few lines of code in your .htaccess files to redirect one state to the other . Doing this prevents any link value loss as its a permanent redirect.



The code goes like this

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

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Doing this will automatically redirect all non www calls to www calls and your site permanently will be marked for www.domainname.com instead of domainname.com


Edit : The .com will need to be changed to .net/.org or whatever your site is.