“Should I use www or no www in my URLs?” is a question that I see almost daily from new webmasters in search engine optimization (SEO) forums around the Internet. The same question gets posed many ways, but basically they want to know which version of their URL is best for SEO.
So I thought I would take the time to answer it here to save myself a lot of typing in the future when responding to forum posts. Yeah. I am lazy… err… efficient like that!
Is using www or no www better for SEO?
The search engines do not care whether you use www or no www in URLs on your site. There is nothing in their ranking algorithms that causes them to rank a www version of a URL higher than a non-www version of the same URL (or visa versa). So the www and non-www are treated exactly the same by the search engines from a ranking perspective.
Whether you use www or no www to link to pages on your site is totally up to you. It is based on your preference. You can base your decision to use one or the other on what looks best on a business card, what rolls off the tongue better, or which version you think consumers will most likely remember. It really doesn’t matter which you pick or why.
Personally, I always pick www versions over URLs with no www because I think consumers have grown to expect www in URLs. Even though they likely type domain names into their browser address bar with no www more times than not, they expect to see the www version of domain names on business cards, advertisements, etc.
So why care about www vs. no www?
There is one major reason you should care about the use of www vs. no www in URLs. As I said before, it doesn’t matter “which” you pick. But it DOES matter that you pick one and stick with it because not doing so CAN affect your rankings. Perhaps it sounds as though I just contradicted myself, but I did not. Let me explain.
The search engines rank URLs. They don’t rank web sites, and they don’t rank web pages. They treat each unique URL as a different page in their index. So they typically see http://canonicalseo.com and http://www.canonicalseo.com as two different pages and will rank them separately.
For example, if 10 sites link to my home page with http://canonicalseo.com and 10 different sites link to my home page with http://www.canonicalseo.com, search engines will typically see this as two different pages, each with 10 inbound links. This creates URL canonicalization issues which lead to duplicate content issues and split page rank/link juice.
Every page on your site should have a single URL used to refer to it called the canonical (preferred) URL. All other non-canonical URLs that can be used to render that same page should be 301 redirected to the canonical URL.
In the above example, if I choose http://www.canonicalseo.com as my canonical URL and 301 redirect http://canonicalseo.com (the non-canonical version with no www) to the canonical URL, Google will now see my home page http://www.canonicalseo.com as having 20 inbound links and the non-canonical http://canonicalseo.com will be removed from their index.
Pick either the www or non-www version as your canonical URL
To sum things up… while URLs with www and without www are treated the same in the ranking algorithm, allowing pages on your site to be referenced both ways without 301 redirecting one of them to the other can hurt your rankings.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I have a site on WordPress MU that defaults to http://mysite.com and I believe www. 301 redirects to this. So if I type in http://www.mysite.com it reverts to http://mysite.com
Anyway, I have done quite a few articles which I linked back to http://www.mysite.com. I then did some bookmarking which I believe would have just taken the url directly from the page so would have used non www. Will this cause a problem and split my link juice or will the 301 redirect resolve this and it won’t matter that I have some links going to www. and some to non www. ???
Thanks.
As long as you actually are 301 redirecting from the www version of your domain back to the non-www version of your domain then the non-www version of your URLs will get credit for inbound links to the www version of your URLs. 301 redirecting web pages like this eliminates the URL canonicalization issues you’re worried about.
If you’re not 100% sure of whether a 301 redirect is actually occuring, there are many tools on the web that will show you the browser/web server interaction including the status codes being returned. You can use the Firebug plugin for Firefox… or you can simply enter a www URL into this web page based http header tool and it will show you the interaction between the browser/crawler and your web server.
I checked it with Web Sniffer and it is 301 redirecting. Many thanks for your help!
Great post and it’s definitely a very good guide on optimisation for beginners. I will have to bookmark this post for some tips. Thanks for sharing this information.
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Really good information about www or no www site. This information is very useful for me.
I agree with you. I also prefer to choose the www just for the fact that our visitors and the general public expect to see it. Especially true in print. It is very rare to see a domain being listed in print such as magazines and books without the www.
You could even say media has somewhat programmed us to expect it. Even today when we type in a web address without the www we expect to see the www appended to the URL.
But it all comes down to choosing one or the other and sticking to it. If you choose one over the other it is always a good idea to 301 redirect. Just for the simple fact you can not control how other sites link to you. They may choose to use the opposite of what you have chosen. Just helps to reduce the chance of duplicate content and beats a split page rank/link juice issues.
Thumbs up on this very informative post.
Very useful information. I’ve recently released a new web site and I’m struggling with ranking. I’ve read a few other posts about canonicalization but this one is easier to understand. Thanks for sharing.