www vs. non www – How should I structure my URL?
Should your URL be presented as http://www.yoursite.com or http://yoursite.com? There is a lot on the web about the Canonical URLs but there is very little info out there about what version of your URL you should use. What to do? Which one am I using? Read on…
In another post entitled “WWW or Not - WWWhat’s in a Name” about canonical URLs and www vs non-www we provided insight into the reasons for choosing one version over the other. Now let’s discuss some of the reasons associated with choosing www vs non-www or vice versa.
The use of www has dominated so successfully that it has become branded in our minds as the “proper” and perhaps, to many, the only prefix for a domain name. From a usability standpoint then this is probably the better choice despite adding four unnecessary characters to every one of your URLs.
There are folks out there that adamantly promote the deprecation of www. Here is a link to one group: http://no-www.org/ . They don’t seem to be very active – their last post was in 2005 - and the reasons for their doing away with www seem to be personal opinion rather than technical. So that is one angle.
Perhaps the best method is to do some SEO investigation and find out which version of the domain has the most backlinks and PageRank. If you have a lot of inbound links pointing to one specific version of the domain you may want to use that one. No sense in fighting an uphill battle.
Those are some good reasons but since we are a search engine optimization company I thought it might be interesting to see what the search engines are doing. If you click the following links, watch the address bar in your browser and see what happens when you click the different links:
http://google.com
http://www.google.com
http://yahoo.com
http://www.yahoo.com
http://live.com
http://www.live.com
http://ask.com
http://www.ask.com
What did you find? I bet the URL changed on the first link for each SE but didn’t on the second. As of this post date I found each of the four search engines used a redirect from the non-www to the www version.
Interesting side note: each of the three majors used the correct permanent 301 redirect. Ask surprisingly used an incorrect temporary 302 redirect.
Ok, lets cut to the chase. Which version am I using?
- If the site I’m working on is an older site then I’ll look at what is going on in terms of linking. That will make my decision for that site.
- What about a new site? I generally go for the www version for usability reasons and because the major SEs that we’re working to get good rankings on use that version on their own sites. That’s a fairly compelling argument which is good enough for me.
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9 Comments
1.
Mitch wrote on July 17th, 2007 at 10:10 am:
Wow! there is so much to know. Thanks for making this clearer. I see I have much reading to do.
Mitch
2.
Mitch wrote on July 17th, 2007 at 10:15 am:
As I read more, I see you think on your feet, you do what is necessary. I like that.
Mitch
3.
Binh Nguyen wrote on October 25th, 2007 at 2:20 pm:
Cool stuff u have there. Personally I would choose no www for shorter. However I found out a reason not to use it. Imagine when you want to check Google index for my website http://www.opentips.com and use the site:opentips.com query you will see the count for all pages including sub domains. I use www.opentips.com for my main site to limit this links so that site:www.opentips.com will return only count of pages from my main domain. It’s also good reason for adsense tracking purpose, you don’t want to mess up with tracking for subdomains into the main domain.
4.
redirecting http://example.com to http://www.example.com - vBulletin SEO Forums wrote on March 23rd, 2008 at 11:08 pm:
[…] wikipedia does And then we all wonder why they rank #1 for like, everything back on topic: www vs. non www – How should I structure my URL? comment #3 makes a really good […]
5.
Info wrote on June 9th, 2008 at 8:29 am:
Hi ,
I have many more inbound links to non-www version and internal linking is also better for non-www version.
But I have decided to switch to www version of website , so I have 301 redirected my all non-www URls to www URLs.
My question is doesnt it have the same effect of re-directing the www to non-www and vice versa as ultimately all inbound and internal links will be added to the one URL which you will prefer.
Please Help me in this regard.
6.
Greg Hill wrote on June 9th, 2008 at 9:06 am:
Thank you for the question. You have an excellent example.
In your case your move may counterproductive.
To determine this, let’s discusse objective of canonicalizing the URL. The goal is to concentrate the benefits of all your backlinks and PR onto one location.
I typically choose “www” as stated above but there are compelling reasons to choose the “non www” version. In your case, unless you have compelling reasons not to, I recommend using the non-www version. The reason I state this is that, given the choice, I’d prefer to redirect the smaller number of links.
Some additional considerations when choosing:
Edit: Remember to revise your Google Webmaster Tools account configuration to match your choice of URL. Go to “Tools” –> “Set Preferred Domain” and choose the www or non-www domain.
7.
WWW or Not - WWWhat’s in a Name | Trinity | Search Engine Marketing wrote on June 9th, 2008 at 9:13 am:
[…] I just posted about how to choose the www or non-www version of your URL for canonical purposes. Click to read more. Bookmark to: by Greg Hill | URL […]
8.
Info wrote on June 10th, 2008 at 1:30 am:
Thank You so much for your detailed response. I have already read the post you mentioned - Great Article !
But confusion still prevails - I want to know technically is really there is a difference if smaller links merge to bigger links or bigger links merge with smaller links , at the end resultant number of links will remain same.
Thanks again !
9.
Greg Hill wrote on June 10th, 2008 at 5:52 pm:
It boils down to risk. I consider my approach to be somewhat of an insurance policy for backlinks. If, for whatever reason, the search engines devalue redirected links over time then the devaluation would occur on the smaller or perhaps the less SEO valuable links.