www or no-www in a website URL?

www or no www? Enforce www preference plugin for WordPress

If you are in a dilemma whether to use www for your blog or not, here are few examples of top websites on the Internet to help you make a decision.

Google, uses www

MSN, uses www

And for that matter 10 out of 10 top websites on the Web according to Alexa use www in their URL’s.

(How do you find whether a website uses www or not? Just type the URL of the website without www. For eg. Google.com and you’ll be redirected to www.Google.com)

And here is a great example that doesn’t use www but also is as famous as the others,

Digg, doesn’t use www.

Whether you type www.digg.com or just digg.com, you’ll only be taken to digg.com.

There are also some famous websites that are accessible both with and without www, which means that if you type www, you’ll be taken to the www version and vice-versa. However, if you follow any top SEO magazine or forum, they surely must have not recommended making a website that is accessible by both with and without www.

The reasons for it are pretty straight forward. Considering Google as a major search engine (Which it is anyway), it takes both the www and non-www versions of a website as two different entities and hence allots a different page rank to each one of them. And there also arises an issue of duplicate content.

Visit this Google help topic page to find out what Google thinks about a www and a non-www page.

So whether you want www in your website address or not is left to you but in any case you should make sure that our website is only accessible by a single entity and that is either with www or without. The other version should redirect to your preferred option.

If you want to make a bit of research before reaching a conclusion, here is a quick thought that you can experiment on. Do few searches on Google with some keywords and look for the sites that turn up, whether they have www or not and which sites are ranking higher. Of course, simultaneously you also need to check the page rank of the corresponding website to reach an acceptable conclusion.

If your site gets major traffic from Google, you can make your URL’s in SERP’s appear  with www just by changing a setting in your Google webmaster account without doing any change to your websites .htaccess

Just visit the settings part under diagnostics in Webmaster tools and select display URL’s as www.yourwebsite.com . The results of which are explained here.

If I have to choose one, I would surely choose with www for few reasons.

Till a month back this site was only accessible without www as only sriraj.org (www.sriraj.org would redirect to sriraj.org)

But I have included both ‘www.sriraj.org’ and only ‘sriraj.org’ under the websites in my webmaster tools account and found that the page rank tool (Just the Blue bar) is moving forward quicker for the www version compared to the non-www version. Which indicates (or at least according to me) that Google likes seeing www in URL’s.

Second reason, I once read a topic on SEO on Chitika website where it explains why having www in your websites address helps your website in optimizing to search engines (Sorry for not being able to find that link now)

If you use WordPress for your blog and want to enforce www (that is to include www) all you have to do is download this beautiful plugin called enforce www preference and activate it. Then make small adjustments in the Settings – General part in your admin area and change blog address’s to include www.

From now, all your URL’s will be displayed only with www.

All you URL’s which doesn’t include the www part but are indexed by search engines will be redirected to the new URL which includes the www part, so that the users are not left with a 404 page. Slowly all the previously indexed non-www URL’s will also be changed to www versions when Google or other search engines update their index database.

If you don’t use wordpress, here is a great guide on how to setup a quick permanent 301 redirects to redirect your users to the new www version. (You should have access to your websites .htaccess file and your server should be powered by Apache)

Look for the Canonical Hostnames part under URL Layout.

What is your take on this? Do you prefer www or non-www version for your website?

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